21_21 DESIGN SIGHT

21_21 DESIGN SIGHT will hold the exhibition "Soup as Life," from March 27, 2026. The exhibition is directed by Natsumi Toyama. She is a designer who matches clothing and shelter as our bodies' external environment, with food as its internal environment. To her, food fills the body from within, so that in their own way, all serve to wrap our bodies. The exhibition uses Soup as the means to consider the origins of food, clothing and shelter.

Soup requires only minimal cooking. It is just ingredients stewed in water. Yet a bowl of soup contains layers of meaning – there is the potential of the ingredients, the effects of heat, the local history, the drinker' s bodily sensations, the receptacle, and the eating area with its atmosphere. External and internal worlds come together so that a life environment emerges from a small bowl. Toyama uses this as a metaphor for her principle of the "body being wrapped."

Modern life grows ever more convenient. But the circumstances and systems supporting it become more complex. Our primordial link to the necessities of food, clothing and shelter, become increasingly distant. This exhibition will rethink everyday lived environments from the perspective of "wrapping." It follows submerged clues, like water, salt, and the physical presence of ingredients such as vegetables, asking how these change on heating, how they respond to the vessels that contain them, their surroundings, and the delicate movements of the spoon. All of these impinge on issues relating to eating, memory and smell. The exhibition will bring out mechanisms of design latent in the zones between abstract structures of food, clothing and shelter on one hand, and feral aspects of nature remaining in our bodily sensations. The agenda is close to 21_21 DESIGN SIGHT' s motto of "using everyday life to think about design through."

Soup may be a minimal food unit, but it is also a place where body, environment, memory and time are folded together. We hope visitors will use their five senses to explore the exhibition and experience the origins of food, clothing and shelter, finding new horizons and generating novel viewpoints and realization.