My Tinder Boys by Yushi Li, made in London from winter 2017 through autumn 2018, portrays young men she met through Tinder, naked and eating in their own kitchens.
Made while Li was using the app for dating, the project examines female desire, gendered spectatorship, and power among photographer, subject, and viewer. Tinder's rapid matching and overlap of attraction with selection structure each encounter, echoing Li's description of app relations as "fast-food culture." Food and the kitchen draw on erotic images of women eating and the British magazine Readers' Wives. Placing men in a conventionally feminine space renders masculinity vulnerable and uncertain. Rather than simply reversing the male gaze, Li asks what happens when a woman looks at a man with desire, and whether control can ever be secure.
Across the color series, young, often boyish men stand or sit unclothed among cabinets, appliances, and food. Li avoided polished kitchens in favor of ordinary interiors, where nudity makes simple actions feel incongruous. Natural daylight, subdued domestic color, and off-camera looks, awkward poses, or nervous bearing move the mood between intimacy and distance. Titles pairing first names with ages and kilometer distances retain Tinder's metadata, while the repeated setting balances individuality with interchangeability.
Li contacted more than 300 men and photographed 15 after generally meeting candidates in public first. During each photographic encounter, she directed position, pose, and sometimes what the sitter ate, while allowing unease and sexual tension to remain visible. The work belongs to her analogue practice and was produced as color C-type prints. Examples depicting Lucas and Tom measure 92 × 92 cm. Li has also described the app-based recruitment, negotiation, and entry into strangers' homes as part of a performance artwork, extending the project beyond its finished photographs.
Recognition in 2018 included the Discovery Awards exhibition in Braga, where Li was a finalist, and Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2018 at South London Gallery. Two images appeared in Neo Hua Ren: New Diaspora in London in 2019, followed by presentations in Cologne in 2019–20 and Oslo in 2021. The series received an extended book-form presentation in Li's first photobook, Baroness, published in 2022.
