Food Art/ Volume 91

Food is one of humanity’s first languages. Before writing, before architecture, before even ritualized image-making, there was the shared act of preparing, offering, and consuming nourishment. In Food Art, Collect Art’s Special Edition Volume 91, we return to this primal yet endlessly complex subject, inviting readers to consider food not merely as sustenance, but as symbol, memory, politics, pleasure, and performance.

Across cultures and centuries, food has appeared in art as abundance and austerity, devotion and excess, intimacy and power. From still lifes that whispered of mortality and wealth to contemporary practices that question global inequality, ecology, identity, and desire, food has remained a potent artistic medium. It is tactile, ephemeral, sensual—and therefore deeply human. In this edition, international artists use food not only as an image, but as material, metaphor, and method.

The artists featured in Volume 91 approach food from strikingly diverse perspectives. Some transform everyday ingredients into sculptural forms, elevating the familiar into the contemplative. Others document meals as social rituals, revealing how what we eat reflects who we are, where we come from, and what we believe. There are works rooted in nostalgia—recipes passed down like heirlooms—as well as works that confront the future: synthetic nourishment, industrial farming, food waste, and climate anxiety. Together, these practices reveal food as a mirror of our collective condition.

Food art resists permanence. It spoils, melts, ferments, disappears. This fragility challenges traditional ideas of art as something fixed and collectible, yet it aligns perfectly with the urgency of our time. Many of the works presented here embrace impermanence as a conceptual stance, reminding us that consumption is an act with consequences, and that beauty can exist in moments rather than monuments. In photographing, documenting, or reimagining these works, the artists extend their life while preserving their vulnerability.

This edition also foregrounds the body—not as an abstract concept, but as a sensing, tasting, desiring participant. Food art collapses the distance between artwork and viewer. It invites appetite, discomfort, memory, and sometimes refusal. Several artists in this volume explore the politics of the body: who is fed and who is starved, whose culinary traditions are celebrated and whose are appropriated, whose labor remains invisible behind abundance. In these works, food becomes a site of resistance as much as pleasure.

At the heart of Food Art are the voices of the artists themselves. Alongside artworks and biographies, we present personalized interviews that delve into process, intention, and lived experience. These conversations reveal how deeply personal food can be: a way of grieving, of reconnecting with ancestry, of asserting cultural presence, or of questioning systems that govern taste and value. The interviews do not offer definitive answers; instead, they open spaces for reflection, much like the artworks they accompany.

Collect Art has always been committed to presenting art as a living dialogue rather than a closed narrative. This special edition continues that mission by crossing disciplines—visual art, performance, photography, design, and social practice—and crossing borders. The featured artists come from different cultural, geographic, and generational contexts, yet they are united by a shared understanding: food is never neutral. Every ingredient carries a story, every meal a history, every table an invitation or an exclusion.

As readers move through Volume 91, we invite slow engagement. Let the images linger. Let the texts provoke hunger—not only for flavor, but for understanding. Consider your own relationship to food: the rituals you repeat, the choices you make, the memories you carry. In a world increasingly defined by speed and consumption, food art asks us to pause and to look again at what sustains us, and at what it costs to be sustained.

Food Art is not a celebration of indulgence alone, nor a critique detached from pleasure. It is a field where beauty and ethics intersect, where the personal meets the political, where the everyday becomes extraordinary. With this edition, Collect Art is proud to present a global portrait of artists who use food to tell stories that are urgent, intimate, and unmistakably of our time.