ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Stephanie Shih (史欣雲) is a visual still-life artist working in photography and multimedia installation, known for her painterly use of shadow, light, and her playful yet incisive approach to food. As a second-generation Taiwanese-Chinese American, Shih draws from her background to reinterpret the traditional language of still life, exploring compositions of everyday objects that merge humor, tenderness, and historical reflection.

In Little Eats, Shih translates the Chinese phrase 小吃 (xiǎo chī) – literally “small eats,” a term referring to substantial snacks, street foods, and small dishes – into a layered record of migration, a gesture of care, and a symbolic recoding of the familiar. Through luminous photographs and hand-built arrangements, Shih transforms tins of Spam, ramen, fried eggs, mochi, peaches, and familiar food packaging materials into sculpted sites of personal and collective reflection.

Engaging with art-historical precedent, Shih reclaims space within a canon that has long centered Western ideals, using the still life to question who and what has defined what it means to be American. Her depictions of peaches and citrus pay homage to Raphaelle Peale’s Peaches Covered by a Handkerchief and A Dessert (Still Life with Lemons and Oranges), works by one of the first professional still-life painters in the United States and a figure often credited with establishing a distinctly American tradition. 

By reinventing these compositions through her own lens, Shih both honors and complicates that legacy, embedding diasporic experience and Asian American cultural narratives into a visual language historically coded as Euro-American. In her hands, the still life becomes both homage and critique, a vessel for lived experience and a reimagining of what constitutes the American table.