Shintaro yakeyake created this artwork along with his exhibition “Sitting on a Chair, Eating Bread” at 8/ ART GALLERY/ Tomio Koyama Gallery (Dec 2013 – Jan 2014). It was his existential fear, along with other personal experiences, that inspired the drawings at this exhibition. He first pondered on the act of eating bread when he was in the depths of an artist’s slump. One day, he ate a piece of bread in his studio, which was unusual for him; he usually favors other snacks, such as onigiri (rice balls). While eating this piece of bread and thinking about how life is full of misery, he realized that people eat even when things are really bad.

After he completed several bread drawings for this exhibition, he asked his Twitter followers what other kinds of bread he should draw. In response to his tweet, someone asked him to draw sandwiches. This idea appealed to Miyake. He looked up sandwich fillings, weights and prices, and created some seriously large sandwiches.