About 

Helen Yu (b. 1997, Shanghai) is a Chinese-Canadian painter living and working in New York. She earned her B.F.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020 and her M.A. from the Sotheby’s Institute of Art in 2025. Yu’s work examines greed, indulgence, and labor as they surface through class and gender performance, social norms, and digital culture.

Having grown up between Asia and North America, Yu’s transnational background informs a perspective attentive to shared cultural conditions across geographies. Her paintings center on desire and temptation, using lush fruits, confections, glowing flesh, and ornate surfaces to probe excess and psychological tension. While visually seductive, these images carry an undercurrent of unease and control. Yu investigates how allure functions in an age of hyper-connectivity, where consumption and self-regulation are intertwined, and restraint exists as a fragile, continually negotiated state rather than a stable ideal.

Her works have been exhibited in Woods-Gerry Triennial (Woods-Gerry Gallery, Providence, R.I., 2015); Kunqu (Shanghai Museum of Glass, Shanghai, 2017); The RISD Illustration Senior Show (ISB Gallery online, Providence, R.I., 2020), The Other to Itself (Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York, NY, 2023); 9 (TheBlanc, New York, NY, 2024); Girl Dinner (Uncool Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2025).