littlecakes is a pseudonym used by a Japanese artist based in the United States who began making AI-generated art in late 2021 or early 2022.,Her collage-based work explores nostalgia and invented folklore in a self-described “sticky, messy, sweet” register that shifts into nightmarish and paranormal territory.,,
Working under her real name, she has exhibited or performed at venues ranging from a Mexican restaurant in Toronto and a sports bar in Boston to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and White Columns in New York. littlecakes has been a visiting lecturer at the Rhode Island School of Design and at Pratt Institute, and for several years ran a gallery out of her apartment that was reviewed in The New York Times. She also worked for more than ten years as the buyer and art director for a store and gallery in Tokyo before taking a hiatus from art to work with animals. Discovering the web3 community brought her back to art.,Her earlier practice was craft-based, shaped by a jewelry and metalsmithing major in art school, and she began using AI to create still images in late 2021 or early 2022.
In February 2024 littlecakes released sometimes you just go with it, an edition of ten made by feeding an image generated on Emprops into Pika for video, shown that fall in a satellite exhibition of works by FuturaCanvas artists at Becoming Art in Jeju, South Korea.In April 2025 she released berry biolence, an AI-generated video series on objkt.one framed as an ode to friends she had made in the Tezos community, its videos mostly set in an underground parking garage and threaded with a recurring strawberry motif. She created the collection's imagery with a custom Flux model trained partly on photographs of her own past performance and costume work, animated it in Luma Ray2 and Pika, and made its audio herself using Udio and Audacity.In April 2026 littlecakes released The Harvest on Fellowship, a video installation that tells a neo-folktale in the shifting styles of a variety show, following hooded caretakers and pink, fairy-like beings through a mythical strawberry harvest inspired by regional Japanese traditions and omikuji fortune-telling.,,
