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Paris syndrome (French: syndrome de Paris; Japanese: パリ症候群, romanized: Pari shōkōgun) is a sense of extreme disappointment exhibited by some individuals when visiting Paris, who feel that the city was not what they had expected. The condition is commonly viewed as a severe form of culture shock. – Wikipedia

When Lei Saito decided to leave her native Tokyo to study art history in Paris, she enrolled at the University of Paris-Nanterre. It was not what she expected. Not even close. She thought she would be attending something like the Sorbonne–

Instead, she got this –

In a 2017 interview Saito described how her “dream” of Paris met the shattering reality of the American-modelled Nanterre campus. “The university contrasted so much with the image I had of the Parisian university - beautiful, historical and welcoming - that I quickly gave up the idea of studying there. However, every morning, I would get up, take the RER and stop at the Nanterre-University stop, before changing platforms to return to Paris. It was probably to ease my conscience. So, instead I spent my days flaneuring around, visiting museums, art galleries and the different districts of the city. One day, while walking around, I came across the École des Beaux-Arts. I immediately wanted to spend my days there.”

The Beaux-Arts fit the bill. Founded in 1648 by Charles Le Brun, housed principally in stately structures built in 1830 by Félix Duban, on rue Bonaparte in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, just across the Seine from the Louvre… Saito applied and was accepted, joining the studio of Annette Messager, thus sidestepping the more dire symptoms of the Paris syndrome, which Wikipedia nicely lays out as: “acute delusional states, hallucinations, feelings of persecution (perceptions of being a victim of prejudice, aggression, hostility from others), derealization, depersonalization, anxiety, as well as psychosomatic manifestations such as dizziness, tachycardia, sweating most notably, but also others, such as vomiting.”

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Instead, Saito focussed on making art – photography, drawings, sculptures, engravings, installations, and, especially, food, reconfigured into what she calls “Cuisine Existentielle”.

Bigger picture: This was in 2004, at one of the many apogees of a cultural moment during which, for the first time since World War II, the city of Paris was reasserting its position as an important art centre. Several factors were at work: the relaxing of France’s auction regulations, which finally allowed foreign (though French-owned) Sotheby’s and Christie’s to open offices in Paris. The local commissaires priseurs of Maison Drouot, for centuries the only public auctioneers allowed to operate in France, were forced to become competitive. Even more so when, in 2002, the Artcurial gallery on the Champs-Élysées was converted into a very successful auction house. In 2006, FIAC, the city’s biggest art fair moved back into the Grand Palais, increased its roster of gallery stands and became a genuine rival of London’s annual Frieze.

Other motors: the explosive growth of the luxury and high-end fashion industries, most of which is Paris-based; the fusion of fashion and art creation and celebrity; and the subsequent collector battle waged between those industries’ two biggest magnates, Bernard Arnault and François Pinault.

The resurgence wasn't just materialistic: it also had intellectual and experiential elements. Dominant among these was the growing cluster and clout of the “relational aesthetics” movement coalescing around the French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud, who co-founded the giant Paris art “laboratory”, the Palais de Tokyo, in 2000. Bourriaud, and to an even greater, global extent the Swiss art curator, critic Hans Ulrich Obrist, championed French artists like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, with varying degrees of participation by elsewhere artists like Maurizio Cattelan, Liam Gillick, Carsten Höller, Jorge Pardo, Gabriel Orozco, Douglas Gordon, Henry Bond, Vanessa Beecroft, and, especially, for the purposes of this post, Rirkrit Tiravanija. 

Especially because, like Saito, Tiravanija, a Thai contemporary artist born in Buenos Aires who works in New York City, Berlin, and Chiangmai, Thailand, often uses food and its preparations in his art installations. Among his best-known works is one of his first, pad thai (1990), at the Paula Allen Gallery in New York, where he left the walls bare and filled the bowls of gallery-goers with his own cooking.

Oft repeated in different forms and flavours, Tiravanija’s installations were the clearest expressions of the relational art concept: bring people together by making art that brings people together. Not the encounter of an audience and an object in a private white cube but of a community and artist-curator catalysts in a public space – interactive, ephemeral, user-friendly, DIY encounters highlighting human relations and social contexts – how we live and act collectively.

It’s a simple enough idea and not new: The Futurists held art banquets, as did the Surrealists. And Fluxus artists like Dieter Roth and Alison Knowles played with their food, as did Daniel Spoerri.

Saito’s recipe, however, is different.

Her work riffs off art and cultural history in unexpected and idiosyncratic ways. Greek mythology, Renaissance paintings, the Marquis de Sade. ‘Decapitated’ pastries dripping raspberry coulis for a Bastille Day party at the Palais de Tokyo. Primordial soup. A black and white landscape created from 30 kg of ash-covered goat cheese, flattened in a few hours by devouring attendees of Nuit Blanche in a secret park in the Marais (where, coincidentally, tomorrow’s Hexagon Paris Wine Walk starts).

But the compositions are not compendiums of puns. They are far richer than the sum of their references. And like the works of relational artists before her, they are transactional in novel ways; they create interactions between people, make them participate in, if not the creation of the works, at least their activation. And destruction.

Where they differ from the relational gang is this: they aspire to be “conceptual” but more than anything, to a more traditional, aesthetic concern – to be “beautiful”. And of course, delish. They are as much about their flavours and textures as they are about their “art”.

From that same interview: “Annette Messager had spoken to me about [Fluxus artist] Robert Filliou. His famous quote ‘Art is what makes life more interesting than art’ has since become a kind of doctrine for me.”

“It reminds me of the Japanese tea ceremony and the concept of "Ichi-go ichi-e", which is to welcome your guests as if it were the last time.”

To get a fuller sense of Saito’s work, have a look at her new book, Cuisine existentielle.

Thank you for reading.