Installation view of Stephanie H. Shih: Domestic Bliss (January 22-February 26, 2025) at Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY.
Stephanie H. Shih (b. 1986, Philadelphia, PA) renders outdated consumer goods as trompe l’oeil sculptures that reveal the tensions within American domestic life. Turning everyday items—a Thighmaster, a self-help book, many pantries’ worth of condiments—into intricately painted ceramic objects transforms each into a permanent artifact. Seen together, the works play with notions of timelessness and obsolescence, nostalgia and disillusionment.
Shih has exhibited work at James Cohan, New York, NY; Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles, CA; Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Alexander Berggruen, New York, NY; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Bradbury Art Museum, Jonesboro, AR; and the American Museum of Ceramic Arts, Pomona, CA. The artist has also been the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant; NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, New York, NY; residency at The Corporation of Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; Arts/Industry Residency at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI; and a grant from the American Museum of Ceramic Arts, Pomona, CA, among other accolades. Her work is included in the collections of the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, CA; and Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, VT, among other institutions. She will be included in forthcoming institutional exhibitions at Christopher Newport University, VA, and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI.
Community work is central to Shih’s practice, and since 2017, she has used her art and platform to raise over half a million dollars in direct aid for victims of state violence. She is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.
Stephanie H. Shih in the studio, Brooklyn, NY, 2025. Photo: Robert Bredvad
STEPHANIE H. SHIH: DOMESTIC BLISS
January 22-February 26, 2025
LEVITY
July 13-August 29, 2023
The title, Domestic Bliss, sets the tone for a sarcastic teen perspective as memory. Alexander Berggruen, a young Upper East Side gallery in New York, with a fresh perspective, just announced the representation of Stephanie H. Shih, congruent with her first solo exhibition with the gallery.
Stephanie H. Shih’s use of ceramics as material pushes even further an alternate interpretation of domesticity. Ancient ceramic vessels were created for domestic use as a container, some more skillfully made or adorned existing as a symbol of decorative elevated status. Shih isn’t trying to deliver a Ming vase, but rather, skillfully reinterpreting commercial products encouraging capitalism and commercialism, so associated with American culture.
Stephanie H. Shih’s recent solo exhibition at Alexander Berggruen in New York, Domestic Bliss, translates directly to “the joy of home life,” but the works seem more like a satire of that idea. Born in 1986 in New Jersey to a Taiwanese-American family, Shih creates ceramic sculptures inspired by household objects and foods from the 1990s. While such themes could easily evoke warmth and nostalgia, the items she selects reveal a quiet desperation and underlying madness of suburban American domesticity.
For instance, the exhibition features an iron and ironing board, with a romance novel face-down on top. A thigh-toning exercise machine and VHS workout tapes, once popular in the 1990s. A stack of classic midlife crisis reads: Divorce For Dummies, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. A half-eaten Filet-O-Fish. A supersized bottle of Diet Coke. A loaf of white sandwich bread. A box of breakfast cereal. The only functioning electrical device in the show is a white Panasonic microwave, its dim yellow light illuminating a rotating black plastic tray where a hamburger patty glistens with grease.
Speaking with Brainard Carey on the Yale University Radio about her solo show at Alexander Berggruen Domestic Bliss (January 22-February 26, 2025), Stephanie H. Shih stated:
“This exhibition for me is one household, as if you’re walking into one family’s domestic situation. I’m interested in playing with these contradictions of wellness and things that are toxic to your body. Are we bettering our bodies for ourselves or our partners? Or is it due to unhappiness with our self image? I wanted there to be this sense of contradiction, unease, and discord.”
“I shy away from the word nostalgia for my work because nostalgia to me feels like a positive feeling. A good longing. What I like to have in my work is more of a complicated feeling. There might be some moments of nostalgia in there, and that might be the immediate feeling you get when you walk into the gallery and you see all of these objects that you remember, but then I would like for the viewer, the more they’re looking, to realize oh, maybe we weren’t so happy back then. Maybe that’s why we had this. Or I thought this was a good memory, but maybe it’s a little more layered.”
Alexander Berggruen—the third generation of his family to deal art—has a solo presentation of ceramics by the young Taiwanese-American artist Stephanie Shih. The works are nostalgic depictions of classic 1990s foodstuffs, consumer products, and cultural staples, like Hot Pockets, Solo laundry detergent, and an Alanis Morissette CD, all rendered in exquisite detail in clay.
The show, titled Domestic Bliss, speaks to a certain middle-class suburban lifestyle riddled with unease and malaise. Her work Nuclear Family is a ceramic microwave with Stouffer’s and Kid Cuisine boxes on top and a Hungry-Man meal spinning inside. The VHS set Buns of Steel and box of Viagra speak to men’s and women’s insecurities and desires. There’s a dustpan with a broken wine glass and remnants of red wine, perhaps the artifacts of a marital spat.
The stories embedded in these charged, chosen objects hint at relationships, conveying clues to hopes and heartbreaks, daydreams and daily concerns.
Regardless of your personal associations or the levels of ’90s nostalgia you harbor for the products Stephanie H. Shih put on pedestals in this show, there’s pleasure in seeing commonplace domestic objects rescued from the garbage bin of mass-produced memory and reimagined as art.
An alchemical mutation happens when everyday objects are reinterpreted with such painstaking levels of craft, as seen in works by kindred sculptors, like Liza Lou and Claes Oldenburg (both of whom have also depicted dustpans, food, and everyday objects). Shih’s hand, too, transforms these objects, infusing them with meaning and heart. These sculptures both preserve a moment in time and turn would-be cultural flotsam into something delightful yet wrenching — and utterly human.
From a darkly comedic perspective, Stephanie Shih explores the multiple meanings of “domestic bliss” in a social landscape fraught with consumerism and clashing politics.
It all started with the 1998 self-help book, Divorce for Dummies. The sardonic humor of a goofy cartoon character exclamatorily holding up a finger offering counsel to one’s broken marriage—for the totally reasonable price of $19.99—was a catalyst for Shih’s interest in the capitalist absurdity that came with the divorce boom of the 1980s and ’90s.
Artist Stephanie Shih conjures a poignant domestic drama by recreating the symbols of temptation, vice, convenience and self-improvement that defined American life in the 1990s.
In Domestic Bliss, a tenderly realized portrait of American life in the 1990s at Alexander Berggruen in New York, the artist Stephanie Shih draws us into a fraught family narrative.
The artist builds the pieces by hand, using a fine brush to decorate their surfaces. There are subtle signs that each object is handmade, evoking the crafted pop sensibility of Corita Kent or Liza Lou — a slightly dappled finish here, a hint of hand lettering there. The net result is the uncanny feeling that the whole room has been seen, recorded, lost, then lovingly recreated, each element conjured by a human being with a memory that aches.
Stephanie H. Shih is particularly interested in how cultures overlap as well as the effects that migration has on one’s identity. “My practice is focused around my identity as an Asian American in the diaspora,” she notes. The daughter of Taiwanese parents, she adds that rather than being pulled between two worlds, she sees, “the unique identity that comes out of being the child of immigrants.”
As the work she is bringing to Dallas attests, food serves as a central theme. By focusing on it, she says that she is tapping into something that is not only universal but also culturally specific. “Food holds a specific place in Chinese and Taiwanese culture. It really is threaded through our society in a way that I think is very unique,” she explains. Using food as a springboard also allows her to connect with a wide audience. According to Alexander Berggruen, “These offer points of connection for a wide variety of people of different backgrounds, different origins, and different walks of life. I always enjoy seeing how visitors connect with various aspects of her work, often from a very personal, gut reaction.”
Thinking they were leftover dishes, a catering staff member drifted into Alexander Berggruen’s booth and attempted to clean up Stephanie H. Shih’s sculptures, consisting of a porcelain 7-Eleven bag paired with a glassy pouch of Funyuns chips.
Stephanie H. Shih’s work Toy Building (Dream House) will be on view in A Beautiful Experience: The Midwest Grotto Tradition at the John Michael Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, WI, from June 2025–May 2026, after which it will be acquired into the museum’s permanent collection. On the occasion of this exhibition and acquisition, Simon Wu wrote an essay exploring the histories this sculpture is in conversation with. This leads him to contemplate “the true conditions of what makes a home: something accreted over time, an attempt to make whatever you have more comfortable than what it is.”
