Mao Sugiyama: The performance artist who cooked and served his own genitals
Performance artists have long regarded self-harm as a tool of expression. For his 1971 performance piece Shoot, American artist Chris Burden had his assistant plant a bullet in his shoulder with a .22 gauge rifle. Two years later, he willingly crucified himself to the bonnet of a Volkswagen beetle. In 1974, Marina Abramović took things a step further with Rhythm. Having laid out 74 objects, she invited audience members to treat her body however they saw fit. By the end of the performance, she had a loaded gun pointed at her head. Since then, performance artists have continued pushing the boundaries in the name of art. Take Japanese artist Mao Sugiyama, for example, who went so far as to cook his own genitals.
In 2012, shortly after his genitals were removed, asexual Tokyo illustrator Mao Sugiyama gently sat down at his laptop. “Please retweet,” he wrote. “I am offering my male genitals (full penis, testes, scrotum) as a meal for 100,000 yen… I will prepare and cook as the buyer requests, at his chosen location.” Sugiyama had spent a long time debating what to do about his genitals. in the weeks leading up to the surgery, he’d embarked on a month-long sex binge to ensure he was definitely making the right decision. Unmoved by his sexual encounters, he went ahead with the surgery and, at the age of 22, had his penis and testicles removed.
Sugiyama double-bagged the severed genitalia and placed them in his freezer for safekeeping. Keen to use the organs for artistic purposes, he considered cooking and eating them himself but soon decided it would be much more interesting to feed them to someone else. Advertising the meal on Twitter, Sugiyama clarified: “The organs were surgically removed at age 22. I was tested to be free of venereal diseases. The organs were of normal function. I was not receiving female hormone treatment. First interested buyer will get them, or I will also consider selling to a group. Will prepare and cook as the buyer requests at his chosen location. If you have questions, please contact me by DM or e-mail.”
The response was so overwhelming that Sugiyama organised a public banquet called Ham Cybele – Century Banquet. Around 70 people showed up to the event at the Asagaya Loft A space in Tokyo’s Suginami ward. Only six guests actually requested the chef’s special, each of them paying the equivalent of $250 for the pleasure. They included a 22-year-old woman, a married couple, a male manga artist and an events planner. All were between 22 and 32 years old. The other 64 guests ate beef or crocodile meat.
After cutting the genitals into thin slices, Sugiyama used a portable gas stove to fry them with mushrooms and parsley. The meat turned out to be very hard to chew and, rather upsettingly, a bit stubbly. “The chef didn’t cook it right, wrote Managing Culinary Director of Serious Eats J. Kenji Lopez-Alt. “What a waste of a perfectly good penis! Penis is pretty tough and needs to be slow cooked, either sous-vide or in a braise.”
None of this went unnoticed. Sugiyama and the event’s organisers were reported to the police by several concerned locals. Of course, there aren’t any laws against cannibalism in Japan, so there wasn’t much the authorities could do. They tried to accuse him of incident exposure, but this was complicated by the fact that Sugiyama’s guests had attended the event willingly. In the end, the authorities dropped all charges.
