Stephanie Shih’s ceramics look good enough to eat

‘It all started with dumplings,’ says New York-based artist Stephanie Shih. ‘I was an amateur potter – making mugs, painting on plates – then one day I realised that clay had an elasticity that reminded me of dumpling dough. So I started folding it just as you’d make a real dumpling – I’d take a little ball of clay, roll it out into a circle and then fold it.’

Little did she know that this was the start of a cross-continental journey of discovery: from dumplings, the artist progressed to making ceramic versions of a variety of Asian groceries she had grown up with in her half-Taiwanese, half-Chinese household in New Jersey in the 1980s and 90s – ‘the kind of items you might see in someone else’s house and immediately think, “we understand each other, even though we’re strangers”.’ Polling her Instagram followers introduced her to a range of products she hadn’t encountered before – Indonesian rice, Malaysian soy sauce and British-origin groceries that are popular in Hong Kong, such as Ribena.

There’s a touch of Warhol to Shih’s work: these glossy items are, on face value, the embodiment of the inescapable impact of consumer capitalism. From Taipei to LA, the shelves of supermarkets are stacked with objects that are recognisable worldover. And yet, through customisation and the lens of cultural memory, these branded products are imbued with a depth of meaning that belies their homogenous packaging.

These objects are also a reminder that food – and therefore people – have always migrated and adapted. ‘A lot of these products bridge two cultures,’ she explains. ‘For example, Spam is such a part of Filipino cuisine and some Korean dishes. That’s a product of the US military presence in Asia, but it would be silly to try to remove Spam from the culture because it’s American. Take banh mi as another example: it is a Vietnamese dish, and yet you cannot separate it from French colonialism – it’s pâté and mayonnaise on a baguette.’ While she recognises that many people may feel a twinge of nostalgia when looking at her work (viewers often feel moved to share deeply personal stories with her), for Shih it’s not an endeavour driven by sentimentality. ‘People feel very protective of their cuisines, but that’s an ahistorical and even dangerous way to understand culture and history.’

Her project exploring the intersection between Jewish and Chinese families in Manhattan is an example of the cultural cross-pollination that interests her. ‘The trope of Jewish families in America eating Chinese food on Christmas day came from the fact that these two groups, who were both not Christian, were living close together on the Lower East Side,’ she explains. In 2022, she exhibited the body of work at a gallery in the heart of the New York neighbourhood: ‘I’m interested in the local history of a place, so I like to ground my projects in the location where they’re being seen.’

While the evolution of food is her interest, when it comes to replicating these items she is strictly faithful to the original: each of her sculptures are made exactly to scale. They are coil built (and therefore hollow) in white stoneware, and she uses a mix of glossy and matt glazes to accurately recreate textures.

Over the past five years, Shih’s interests have expanded, and she now uses clay to explore different aspects of the diasporic experience, from the communication gap between first and secondgeneration migrants, to familial rituals. And yet, she keeps returning to familiar territory: her latest artwork is a five-and-a-half-foot (1.7m) sculpture in the shape of a pagoda that resembles the one her grandfather’s ashes are kept in, made of 120 individual fruits and plates, to reference Daoist and Buddhist offerings to their ancestors.

It is, after all, difficult to look past the emotional potency of food: ‘It is political and I love that. There’s so much hidden history inside recipes.’

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