As if it was ready to eat.. A Korean artist makes fake bread that stimulates the appetite

- What if you entered a bakery and found no bread in it? From this question, South Korean artist Jimin Lee begins her artistic project “FAKERY”, which re-presents bread, with its association with taste, smell, warmth, and memory, in works of art that cannot be eaten, but only seen.

Through fabric, wire, and precise modeling techniques, Lee reconstructs familiar objects in a new form that retains their original features, but loses their usual function. The idea for FAKERY started at the end of last year, when Lee was first working on a series of baking businesses.

The South Korean artist says that the idea of ​​holding an entire exhibition around the concept of a “fake bakery” came to her suddenly, and she found imagining a “bakery without bread” a fun and interesting idea. From here, the features of the project began to take shape, which transforms a familiar object from daily life into a work of art separate from its original function.

The feeling of childhood happiness at the smell of fresh bread, but the choice of bread was not arbitrary. Rather, it is linked to a personal memory of the South Korean artist, as she tells me that her mother used to bake bread whenever she received guests at home, and she used to explain to her that the smell of fresh bread makes people feel happy. Therefore, for her, this smell became associated with someone coming to the house and preparing to receive a dear guest.

In an interview with the Ofoq News website in Arabic, Lee indicated that these memories made the smell of bread in her home a constant source of comfort, in addition to the fact that the sight of bread gave her a feeling of happiness. Through her works, she wanted to preserve this sense of warmth, along with the memory of welcoming others into the home, and to transform baking into an art form that can be visually reclaimed.

In her previous works, Lee also relies on combining wires and textiles to create models. She uses wires to draw the outer shape of a cup, for example, while fabric is used to represent what it contains. The South Korean artist says that what gives her special pleasure is using the minimum of lines and structure to represent things, explaining that leaving the models empty inside gives the viewer space to imagine what could be present in them.

But FAKERY baking works are different from this method, as these pieces do not use any wires or separate internal supports, but rather create their 3D shape entirely from fabric. The process, according to her description, is similar to folding paper; She designs a special model for each type of bread, then prints an image of the real bread on the model, before cutting the fabric, assembling it, and turning it into a three-dimensional model.

Lee points out that designing the model is the stage that requires the greatest amount of time and accuracy, especially since it is the primary factor in determining the final form of the work. Each piece, from the beginning of its development until its completion, requires about two weeks of work.

As for choosing the things that she re-presents, for her, it is not subject to a fixed rule, but rather it often starts from a sudden memory or idea that passes through her mind at a specific moment. In order to accurately capture the distinct colors and textures of each object, Lee experiments with different lighting angles and photographs objects, then experiments with printing her images on fabric until she achieves the result she is looking for.

She explains to me that some of her works, including the Bread series, are designed so that the viewer recognizes the original object at first glance. In other works, she reinterprets things from her own perspective, adding a bit of her imagination and presenting them in a new form.

As for the next step, it does not seem to me that she is ready to leave the world of baking yet, as there are still many types that she wants to implement, and therefore she wants to continue developing the series and delve into it.