If You Feel Pain and Danger Beneath It, That Is Equally True: Scarlett Yang’s Her Feast

London-based Chinese illustrator Scarlett Yang creates a series of five works drawing on 17th-century Dutch sumptuous still-life painting to explore how abuse can be disguised as intimacy, transforming cut fruit, flowers, sweets, seafood and animal remains into a ritualised banquet where women are symbolically consumed.

Pronkstilleven, the lavish Dutch still-life tradition of the 17th century, was built on tension. The abundance was real and the decay was already present within it. Scarlett Yang saw in that tradition a visual language precise enough to say something about how harm operates within intimacy: how exploitation can be packaged as celebration, how violence can arrive dressed as desire.

Her Feast is a series of five works that can be viewed individually or together as a larger, ritualised composition. Cut fruit, flowers, sweets, seafood and animal remains stand in for the female body across scenes that appear lush and seductive before revealing, on closer attention, traces of harm.

“For me, much of the harm women experience does not appear as overt violence,” Yang says. “It can be wrapped in love, desire, beauty, and seduction. So if you see beauty and tenderness in my work, that is true; if you feel pain and danger beneath it, that is equally true.”

The series was developed between late 2025 and early 2026, with each work growing from one of five mapped forms of discomfort within women’s sexual experiences. The Harvest begins with greed and excessive demand. The Offering uses the sweetness of desserts to evoke deception, a Lolita-like quality of apparent innocence concealing exploitation. The Allure explores seduction turning into ruin, beauty and desire as a trap from which escape becomes difficult. The Bloom returns to the same repeated animal remains to reflect the lingering, cyclical impact of sexual violence. The Delicacy closes the feast in decay, seafood becoming a metaphor for discomfort associated with sexual health. Across the five works, the red threads that appear in each composition become progressively sharper and more tense, the formal language enacting the escalation in the content.

The project moved from digital work into physical space in In Between, a group exhibition at 37 Looe Street Gallery in Plymouth in 2026. The full composition was printed on fabric at 2.55 metres wide and suspended freely at the centre of the gallery, alongside A3 fine art prints of the five individual works. The scale and the soft, flowing material gave the still life a spatial and physical presence that extended what the images could do: something between an altar and an installation, both seductive and disquieting in the way Yang intended.

Scarlett Yang is a London-based Chinese illustrator and visual artist working across feminist themes and social issues through surreal and symbolic imagery, drawing on both Chinese and Western visual traditions.

Website: scarlett-yang.com Instagram: @scarlettyang.ig

Her Feast, 2025 to 2026. Five-part digital illustration series. Exhibited as In Between, 37 Looe Street Gallery, Plymouth, 2026. Fabric print, 2550 × 1200mm; A3 fine art prints. Photography: Bo Fan.