FEAST
L. Song Wu
November 7, 2025 – January 3, 2026
Artist Reception and walk-though: Nov 8, 3-5pm
Johansson Projects presents Feast, a solo exhibition of paintings by L. Song Wu. The show is structured like an Italian full-course meal, unfolding in stages that explore the eroticism, performance, and violence behind acts of eating and consumption. Each painting resembles a thumbnail for a mukbang video—marked by surreal excess, seductive abundance, and intimate spectacle. Food is arranged with deliberate absurdity, pulled from internet virality, childhood memory, and embodied fantasy, reflecting Wu’s cross-cultural experiences across the U.S., China, and Italy—three places with deeply distinct but overlapping food traditions, aesthetics, and anxieties.
Feast presents a curated menu and dinner party of archetypes: dinner guests that range from the hyper-visible mukbanger—who performs impossible appetites while maintaining an impossibly thin body—to the fashionable modern woman, seated before a plate of rainbow mantis shrimp and armed with Arne Jacobsen silverware, yet looking disaffected, disconnected. These characters are at once familiar and uncanny, their consumption deferred, withheld, and grotesquely on display.
Eating, in these works, becomes a fraught and complex act—both intimate and performative, pleasurable and punishing. Across the paintings, consumption is never neutral: it is a site of desire, excess, control, and projection. Whether through the hyper-aestheticized table settings, the impossible quantities of food, or the emotional distance of the figures, the show explores how what we consume (food, culture, images) shapes our identity and how this ties into broader philosophical ideas about self-construction and the influence of external factors. While inspired in part by the sensory overload of mukbang videos—with their exaggerated intimacy and spectacle—the paintings also echo more everyday rituals: the loneliness of solo dining, the choreography of a formal meal, or the pressure to eat “correctly” across cultures. Drawing on Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ notion of “indigestion” as a failure or refusal of incorporation, Wu asks what it means to consume, or to be consumed, in a world where appetites are always being shaped by race, gender, class, and the gaze of the viewer.
Ultimately Feast stages a meal we cannot fully swallow. It seduces, repels, and leaves us hungry—for what, exactly, remains unsettled.
Feast runs from November 7, 2025 – January 3, 2026. On November 8 from 3-5 pm we will be hosting the artist walk-through and reception. The show will also be doubling as a food drive – please bring non-perishable foods if you are able. All donated food will go to Alameda County Food Bank.
For all inquiries, contact Johansson Projects at 510-444-9140 or info@johanssonprojects.com
L. Song Wu on Her Paintings, Symbolism, Life, and More | 9 December 2024 by Ruben Palma for Overstandard
“The environments that emerge in my works distill the essence of places I’ve been to or dreamed of, populated by anonymous figures—representations of people I must have encountered in dreams or nightmares.” LINK
L. Song Wu’s ‘Gleaming Things’ is a provocative study of the fictional and the self | 10 November 2022 by Alexandra Blum for Stanford Daily
“[Wu’s paintings express] dysmorphia tied to perceptions of Asiatic beauty, as well as American traditions of passion and violence.” LINK
L. Song Wu is a figurative painter originally from Tampa, Florida, currently dividing her time between northern California and Milan. Her paintings explore the tension between intimacy and alienation, challenging viewers to confront their own sense of belonging and constructions of place and femininity. Drawing from a range of sources like anime, YouTube thumbnails, and memory, Wu creates a meticulously crafted world that refracts her ideas of place and self in today’s dizzying contemporary landscape. Wu’s work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. She has been selected as a finalist for the AXA Art Prize and the Tournesol Award.
My work explores feelings of alienation vs. belonging and desire vs. violence, shaped by my experience as an Asian American woman in the west. Using 2D mediums like oil and acrylic on canvas, I create figurative paintings that navigate the tension between intimacy and distance. I often place Asian female figures in surreal, emotionally charged settings—faux-European villas, glowing nightscapes, or flattened fantasy spaces—where they become subject, object, and spectacle all at once. Their direct gaze and deliberate ambiguity invite, resist, and complicate the act of looking.
Drawing from sources like anime, landscape, pop culture, and personal memory, I construct scenes that reflect today’s fragmented visual culture and its saturation with conflicting images of Asian femininity. I’m interested in how race, gender, and power play out through surface, pose, and image. Influenced by scholars such as Anne Anlin Cheng and Vivian Huang, I think of inscrutability not as a limitation, but as an aesthetic and affective strategy—a way of withholding or refracting the gaze as a form of agency and resistance.
Ultimately, my paintings aim to expand how Asian American femininity is seen, felt, and imagined. By blending the personal and cultural, I intend to create a space within painting for complexity, contradiction, and presence.
