Karin Morita

Introducing the contemporary artist Karin Morita.

Artist

Karin Morita

About the Work

In short: Karin Morita’s work is a work that lets us rediscover new value—and the preciousness of life—in the everyday foods we so often take for granted!

Her work offers a fresh way of thinking about the “life” we encounter so casually each day. Grounded in the philosophy of animism, she gives form to the belief that a soul dwells in all things.

And among them, she focuses on the most familiar and essential presence in our lives—“food”!

Eating is part of a vast cycle that sustains every living thing, ourselves included. Her work is a work that honors the life dwelling within food! Through her art, she offers a chance to see food not merely as nourishment, but to give thanks and pay respect to the life held within it.

Her love of food runs from photographing ingredients to cooking them. In her work, their vivid colors and textures are rendered in meticulous detail, and she even dries portions of the ingredients into powder and blends it into the resin as a finishing touch. Every choice is made so the viewer can feel the sheer force and mystery of “life” directly.

The surface is glossy, and against the black background the viewer’s own reflection appears, overlapping with the ingredients—an expression of how, once digested and absorbed, they become part of our own bodies!

In this way, Karin Morita’s work becomes a powerful medium that conveys not merely “beauty,” but the beauty and complexity of “life” itself.

Please come and experience it for yourself at the gallery!

Profile

Born in Mie Prefecture

Within Japanese culture, rooted in Shinto’s reverence for nature, there is the spirit of “animism”—the belief that a soul dwells in all things—as expressed in the idea of the “eight million gods” (yaorozu no kami).
I grew up in the satoyama countryside of Mie Prefecture, the spiritual heart of Shinto, and as a child I played while encountering the sense of animism as part of daily life. Surrounded by nature, I came to take an interest in the relationship between “life, death, and the body (matter).”

In Shinto too, eating was once a sacred ritual—a divine rite of receiving other lives to sustain one’s own. The word “itadakimasu” is a remnant of this, and we Japanese once ate other lives in daily life, filled with respect, gratitude, and reverence for all living things.
In our materially abundant age, eating is done for all sorts of reasons—for entertainment, for fashion, or simply to satisfy hunger. The purpose of giving thanks to other lives and passing life on is becoming secondary.

When we ask ourselves whether we truly turn our attention to giving daily thanks for our meals, perhaps we cannot help but look to the spiritual richness of ancient people, who must have lived with material scarcity.
To whom, and to what, is the “itadakimasu” we use today addressed? Through food—the most familiar form of life close at hand—I pose a question about what abundance truly means in our time.

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https://www.instagram.com/karin_artworks/

History
2016 Graduated from the Department of Art Education, Faculty of Education, Mie University

2023 Feb “New green leaves” (DDDART), Shimokitazawa
May “UP AND COMERS in SHIBUYA SCRAMBLE SQUARE”
(+ARTgallery), Shibuya Scramble Square
　　　Aug Exhibited at “Independent Tokyo 2023”
　　　Sep “Hello +ART Tokyu Plaza Shibuya” (+ARTgallery), Tokyu Plaza Shibuya
Oct　“Dalston group exhibition -part5-” (gallery Dalston)

Exhibition Views

At first glance the ingredients look almost like photographs—rendered so precisely that they are striking and utterly overwhelming!

You can feel a vivid, living energy, as if an aura radiates from the ingredients themselves!