The following article was first published by Square Cylinder on Dec. 5. Feast is on view at Johansson Projects until January 3rd, 2026.

L. Song Wu’s “Feast” takes its inspiration from South Korean Mukbang videos to reflect upon banal but disconcerting appetites of modern women with food. Song’s eighteen painted and color penciled dining portraits and life size ceramic food sculptures nevertheless raise larger questions about the gaze and power in a wilderness of screens.

“Gold Lobster (Secundo)” depicts a dark-haired woman seated behind a plattered lobster with dark red curtains at her back. Aside from the baby blue plate and ramekin full of gold liquid butter, bed of green arugula, and lobster rendered with chiaroscuro techniques, the entire scene is cast in red light, articulating macabre shadows on the subject’s smiling face. Wu uses acrylic paint on the whites of the eyes, gums, and teeth, creating a focal point with their brilliant flatness that counterbalances the lobster. Just one out of thirty million lobsters have the genetic mutation that makes them gold. In this portrait of culinary indulgence the young woman is on the verge of consuming the rarity.

Mukbanging is an internet trend popularized a decade ago. The object of participants is to eat for internet audiences. The trend encompasses different eras and styles that have been categorized, from rapidly eating mass quantities of elaborately prepared or fast foods to more recent iterations that involve eating pizza with sloppy ranch dressing while recounting one’s day in a car. Wu’s 2D works capture some of those quotidian moments, as in “Publix Fried Chicken,” a color pencil drawing of two young people, side by side in the background, whose faces are contorted by the effort of eating. In the foreground, a veritable landscape of fried chicken, dipping sauce bowl, and carrier bag with more fried chicken, the lot of which take up three quarters of the picture plane, diminishing the human figures. 

In another colored pencil work, “Baby Snails,” a woman with overlarge eyes and a blond bob smiles with teeth defined by the whiteness of the page. Her face occupies three quarters of the composition. Her left hand, cropped on the right-hand side, holds a fork while snail tongs enter from the left grasping a snail shell, revealing a human face inside. Her eyes are closed but the face is otherwise similar to the glossy-eyed diner. One might consider Lacan’s premise that an infant’s ego begins to form when they recognize themselves in a mirror. The individual develops additionally as they begin to look at inanimate objects or symbolic groups — society, for instance. In “Baby Snails,” both the figure and its familiar, the snail, face outward. 

Mukbang performances garner millions of viewers and millions of dollars. They rely on the commercial agendas of social media platforms like TikTok or YouTube, themselves framed by national regulations of free speech, while simultaneously harvesting the data of its users and implementing an algorithmic mirror of those same users such that they only see themselves. If Manet’s “Olympia” famously broke the third wall of the painting with a returned female gaze, Wu’s self-absorbed figures are gazing only at themselves. In “Local Perversion” a child in pigtails sits at a table with a knife and fork, cutting up an anime doll in a pool of blood. The doll looks up as the child looks ever so slightly away and to the side, distracted from the viewer’s gaze.

As though to reinforce the primacy of one’s imagined audience, “Feast” also includes life size ceramic sculptures of food such as “Paste: Piemontesi,” a collection of ceramic hors d’oeuvres on a silver platter, and “Mantis Shrimp” on a white platter. A dining room table of plated foods, “Seafood Boil,” features a blue lobster centerpiece. There is real joy in the playful rendering of these foods with added play on the performance of eating, emphasized by a looping overhead sound installation of unseen mouths chewing. 

Chewing is another feature of mukbang videos. Often described as ASMR (“Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”), fans allegedly find the rhythmic pattern of masticated celery, carrots, or meat soothing. As with the expressions of Wu’s figures, however, the soundtrack reinforces the show’s uncanny feeling of a praying mantis eating her mate inside a red dome of jelly, for instance, as in “Budino (Dolce).” “After Gober (Fromaggio)” is a bird’s eye view of six cheeses that reveal one wedge with hair on its rind that projects Surrealist bravado. In another portrait, “Mom’s Medicinal Soup (Primo),” a woman gazes ambivalently into a large bowl of soup, backlit by a fluorescent orange window, slatted with blinds. The woman places one hand on her cheek while her other hand rests on the edge of the bowl featuring sea horses, sea cucumbers and shells. Her pointer finger snakes into the bowl like a straw. Such deviations from anatomical accuracy add a sense of danger and instability to this feast. 

“When everything is human,” Brazilian scholar Eduardo Viveiros di Castro writes, “human becomes a wholly other thing.” Wu captures a tone of self-cannibalization, in which the performer desires above all else to ingest their own point of view for their own ongoing consumption. Our worlds now consist merely of our own gaze, a gaze met and reciprocated daily on screens, that is then reinforced and agitated by algorithms and mirrored by AI. If the lot mesmerizes users, then “Feast” captures the staid barbarism of this narcissistic and self-damaging loop.