Organizer
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Uncool Artist
Girl Dinner – A Solo Show by Helen Yu
Aug 28-30st, Thu to Sat, 4 to 6 pm, by appointment only.
Reception: Aug 29, 7 to 9 pm.
Helen Yu’s debut exhibition examines digital feminism through themes of consumption, labor, and performance. Featuring works that weave together glossy confections, staged gestures, and hyperreal detail, the exhibition interrogates how feminine identity is constructed, curated, and surveilled in physical and virtual spaces.
Come feast your eyes…
Girl Dinner brings together a collection of paintings that confront the politics of digital femininity through food, fantasy, and performance. Borrowing its title from the viral 2023 TikTok trend where women shared makeshift snack-assemblies such as grapes and cheese as “dinner,” the exhibition reimagines this seemingly playful ritual as a stage for appetite, desire, and discipline.
In Cake Study, a ruined cake dissolves into gestural abstraction, its bold colors and strokes collapsing indulgence into excess. Besties entangles two interlinked arms within a latticed pie, echoing the shallow warmth of casual digital exchanges and intimacies. Chu~ frames glossy lips and a lollipop through the lens of K-pop and “kawaii” aesthetics, where sweetness slips into fetishized performance.
The series Peek-A-Boo stages horror in confectionary form: in (i), doll-like legs sprawl from a bitten red velvet cupcake beneath theatrical lights; in (ii), clawing hands emerge from a jam-filled heart-shaped moat, engulfed in piped cream like a cake-decorating video turned uncanny. In Girl Dinner, whipped cream sprawls into a woman’s face crowned with grapes, its scalloped plate recalling both domestic ritual and saintly halo. Rituals expands intimacy toward fantasy, as flower-shaped candles float in bathwater reflecting galaxies (also echoed in chu~).
Collectively, these works examine the infantilizing aesthetics of “girlhood” as both a self-adopted identity and a cultural expectation. Yu’s vocabulary of cakes, creams, and fragmented bodies positions pleasure alongside discipline, and humor alongside horror. Symbols of desire, care, and sweetness intertwine with themes of fetishization, performativity, and the constant labor imposed upon the feminine body.
Drawing from the art-historical lineage of food painting—from Dutch still lifes to contemporary Pop spectacle—Yu reinterprets indulgence as both fantasy and constraint. Girl Dinner reveals beauty, appetite, and intimacy as staged acts: rituals performed under the scrutiny of digital culture, where the feminine ideal is continually consumed, endlessly curated, yet never fully satisfied.
Now come join us for Girl Dinner, where we partake in the consumption, question, and savor the tensions between sweetness and spectacle together.
– Helen Yu
Besties, 2025.
Oil on canvas
18x24in
Cake Study, 2025.
Oil on canvas
12x16in
Chu~, 2025.
Oil on canvas
11x14in
Mini Bio
Helen Yu (b. 1997, Shanghai) is a Chinese-Canadian oil painter living and working in New York. She earned her B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020 and has spent her life moving between Asia and North America, experiences that deeply inform her perspective on global identity and culture. Yu’s works explore notions of greed, indulgence, and labor as observed in gender performance, societal norms, and digital landscapes. Her works have been exhibited in Woods-Gerry Biennial (RISD, Providence, R.I., 2015); Kunqu (Shanghai Museum of Glass, Shanghai, 2017); The Illustration Show (Providence, R.I., 2020), The Other to Itself (Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York, NY, 2023); 9 (TheBlanc, New York, NY, 2024), etc.
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