Food Studio

The Silk Road, which used to be a physical route on a map, has now become a multidimensional global phenomenon where the silk is replaced with knowledge and the traders become cross-pollinating honeybees. The speeding up of communications and the exchange of ideas across borders and cultures has reinvigorated our knowledge about ancient food traditions and highlighted the need for a deeper and wiser approach to our vision of sustainability and the way we lead our lives.

Masayo Funakoshi's way of cooking food is one of its kind. As she says, she needs to "inhale" the atmosphere of a place, it's people and it's ingredients, before "exhaling" in the form of a serie of culinary preparations that she arranges on the table as a colourful, textured and delicious landscape. Following her studies at Pratt Institute majoring in Fine Arts, Masayo Funakoshi looked to the culinary arts to express her creativity and soon continued her journey to culinary school in New York.

The sense of an all encompassing eternal foreignness is felt when entering Nara. The sense of longing wafts through the ancient landscape far from the imagination of those living in the present. Unfathomable to our present day information centric society; the encounter to a vivacious inter-cultural past, fused with the imagination of the ancient culture unique to this island country Japan.