fruity fortune 34
Video, 2026 · 1/1
About the artwork
Luck is something that comes up in many forms in Japan. My mother watches the morning news waiting for them to tell her what her lucky color is for the day and what level of luck to expect that day. When I was born my family consulted a numerologist to look at the names they were thinking of giving me in order to mark each possibility with an X meaning bad, a triangle meaning OK, a circle meaning good, and a circle within a circle meaning very good. My former boss would consult the annual fortune almanac that tells you whether a particular day might be auspicious or not and he would open new stores on dates that sounded best. If you’ve ever visited, you may have gotten an omikuji fortune at a shrine or temple, paying a small fee to usually shake a tall box that will give you a stick with a number on it which corresponds to a particular piece of paper that will tell you what kind of luck you have. If it’s good, you might keep it, if it’s bad, you can tie it to a string on the grounds and “leave your bad luck behind”. It’s meant more for encouragement or as a gentle warning to be careful rather than some kind of heavenly lottery win or eternal damnation.
I’ve used it here as a vehicle to show more of the berry world, what happens within it, and how different or the same it might be region to region. Maybe the customs are similar, maybe they are not, even though their base berry belief is the same.
Audio explanation
Listen to littlecakes discuss this work.
littlecakes is a thinly veiled alias. She is a Japanese woman living in the West. Her work using AI explores her experience as a native to both cultures, nostalgia, imagined folklore, and creating her own special space somewhere between sticky, messy, sweet, nightmarish, and the paranormal.
As an artist using her irl name, she has exhibited work or performed at venues as varied as a Mexican restaurant in Toronto and a sports bar in Boston, to institutions such as Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and White Columns in New York. She has been a visiting lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design and at Pratt Institute. She ran a gallery out of her apartment for several years which was reviewed and featured in The New York Times and other publications. She was also the buyer and art director for a store/gallery in Tokyo for 10+ years featuring weird and wonderful artist made goods. She took a hiatus from art to pursue working with animals and was inspired to come back to art after finding and becoming involved in the web3 community.