{"id":874821,"date":"2026-06-18T01:55:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T01:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/874821\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T01:55:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T01:55:29","slug":"stephanie-shihs-site-specific-still-life-at-lacmas-david-geffen-galleries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/874821\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephanie Shih’s site-specific still life at LACMA’s David Geffen Galleries"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Stephanie <\/p>\n

Stephanie Shih, \u201c\u6885\u570b (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo),\u201d 2025\/2026. Archival pigment print on wood panel, varnish, glue, acrylic, frame. 38.25\u00d748.25\u00d73.75.<\/p>\n

(From the artist)<\/p>\n

\"img_dropcap_Bibliophile_m.png\" <\/p>\n

Much has been written about the experience of aimlessness in the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA<\/a>, but it is another thing to experience it firsthand. The meandering floor plan, with its rooms of various sizes and orientations alongside their resulting passageways and corners, demands that you wander, not map, your perusal of the galleries. As a result, a visitor can easily feel disoriented, or in my case, a touch deconstructed. A little depersonalized, if you will.<\/p>\n

Fortuitously, I was there to meet with multidisciplinary artist Stephanie Shih<\/a>, whose photo-based compositions have the opposite effect, grounding the viewer in their personhood and experience. Her still lifes are made both beautiful and meaningful through their intentional arrangement of specific food, florals and ephemera, touching on diasporic understandings of self, Western and European appropriations of the \u201cexotic\u201d and the juxtaposition of the natural with the fabricated. In other words, to view a Shih piece is to collaborate with the artist on reconstructing or, in some cases, reclaiming an understanding of place and self.<\/p>\n

We were talking about, and in front of, Shih\u2019s new piece, \u201c\u6885\u570b (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo),\u201d which was not only commissioned by LACMA, but created in a temporary studio Shih constructed within the gallery itself over the course of two weeks late last year. The image features two ceramic vessels, one slightly in front of the other, within a traditional still life scene. The background jar stands alone, while the piece in the foreground overflows with a rainbow of plants, flowers, fruit, chamoy candies, gummies and a single real butterfly. To get to the small but sunny corridor that houses the work, one might make a few indirect turns and cross the gallery containing Andreas Gursky\u2019s \u201cOcean\u201d series<\/a>. Flanked by four wall-size photographs of vast, overhead perspectives of the deep blue Indian Ocean, it\u2019s easy to feel small among the giant panels. Luckily, when I met Shih at LACMA, she intercepted me outside and led us confidently up the Geffen\u2019s dramatic exterior staircase and to \u201cThe Global Appeal of Blue-and-White Ceramics\u201d installation \u2014 no crossing of oceans necessary.<\/p>\n

After our conversation, I stayed to wander the galleries for a few more hours. I am a completist and I wanted, no, needed to see everything. Without the prescribed navigation I was accustomed to in a museum, this became a fool\u2019s errand. I got physically lost and a bit lost to myself. Had I already seen that statue or did it just look like another visage also rendered in marble a few galleries back? I was pretty sure I had already taken these two rights and then a left before, but what if I hadn\u2019t and would then miss a whole other room? The 360-degree curved glass walls encasing the galleries offered many glimpses of a face that belonged to me but somehow wasn\u2019t mine. Who was I? I felt like I would never see everything on display, but also maybe never again exist beyond the funhouse of the Geffen Galleries. In my confusion, I passed by \u201c\u6885\u570b (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo)\u201d more than once and was reminded of Shih\u2019s ability to articulate complex reconstructions of self through her exquisite, serene compositions. It was enough to reassure me that I could find myself again, if only I slowed down and considered my context with curiosity instead of fear.<\/p>\n

This curiosity led me to \u201cShaping Dutch Identity: The Mr. and Mrs. Edward Carter Collection.\u201d It was a serendipitous encounter for two reasons: One, the visual and symbolic correlation between Shih\u2019s painterly use of shadow in her food- and floral-centered compositions, and the still life masterpieces of the 17th century Dutch. And two, because much like her work itself, our interview included layered discussion of constructing and shaping identities. Take the new Peter Zumthor-designed building in which we found (and in my case, lost) ourselves, which builds upon the existing galleries of LACMA while redefining the museum\u2019s identity. Or Shih\u2019s in-situ studio, which was created for creation\u2019s sake, then taken down with only a photo of its contents remaining \u2014 contents which were constructed by the artist, too.<\/p>\n

There was also the progression across cultures and continents of blue-and-white ceramics, which mirrors the evolution of chamoy, a pickled fruit condiment in Mexican cuisine that, along with a blue-and-white Talavera jar, is at the center of Shih\u2019s piece. Both the ceramic and the chamoy traditions symbolize layers of culture as shaped by globalism and localism.<\/p>\n

At one point in our conversation, I was momentarily embarrassed when I couldn\u2019t recall the Filipino term for dried sour plums (kiamoy), a precursor to Mexico\u2019s chamoy. It was an aspect of my identity as a third-generation Filipina that was also irretrievable to me that day. Shih was understanding and gracious in her response: \u201cOne of the really fun parts of the work I get to do is learning a lot of these histories that get hidden from us.\u201d Given Shih\u2019s academic background \u2014 she holds a PhD from Stanford University in linguistics \u2014 it makes sense that she brings deep research to her practice. Her art is rich with symbolism and history. But Shih\u2019s work is also playful and, much like her response to me, generous in the invitation it extends to viewers to bring their own identities to her pieces in order to construct meaning for themselves. I may have felt unmoored among the Geffen\u2019s myriad corners and paths, but never when I was standing in front of Shih\u2019s piece.<\/p>\n

\"Installation <\/p>\n

Installation view of the inaugural presentation in the David Geffen Galleries, April 2026, featuring (top) Stephanie Shih\u2019s \u6885\u570b (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo) (2025- 26) and (bottom) Jar (c. 1700-50).<\/p>\n

(Museum Associates \/ LACMA)<\/p>\n

Claire Salinda:<\/b> Your composition captures flowers, chamoy and other candies and fruit sumptuously arranged in and around a ceramic jar from LACMA\u2019s permanent collection. How did you decide on chamoy as a subject? And how is it contextualized within the new David Geffen Galleries?<\/p>\n

Stephanie Shih:<\/b> \u201c\u6885\u570b (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo)\u201d is on display in \u201cThe Global Appeal of Blue-and-White Ceramics.\u201d The gallery presents a condensed history of blue-and-white ceramics globally in dishes, starting in the Middle East with a 9th century Iraqi piece. From the Middle East we really got the use of cobalt in designs, and that married with the introduction of porcelain from China. We also have the Iznik kilns in Turkey, which are still operating today, and influences into Southeast Asia, and so on. Later on, the influence spread farther afield into Japan and France, where they started adding even more to it. The blue-and-white tradition has really spread globally, so this gallery is a nice microcosmic story of the effects of globalism before modern globalism.<\/p>\n

For a long time I\u2019ve been wanting to make a piece about chamoy and was just waiting for the opportunity to do so. The story of chamoy really parallels this journey of blue-and-white ceramics, which got to Mexico because of Spanish colonialism and then was adopted by local artisans. They really made it their own in the Talavera tradition. Chamoy similarly comes from Asia through pickled plums, particularly China via the Philippines. Filipino laborers came to Mexico via colonialism, and adapted and adopted champoy with spices and chilies from Mexico to become chamoy<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The curator, Susie Ferrell, gave me a whole list of blue-and-white surveys that they were looking at. We went to storage and to the conservation labs to look at all the pieces and we ended up choosing two pieces to work with. The one in \u201c\u6885\u570b (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo)\u201d is a Mexican Talavera jar from the 1700s. It\u2019s the first non-Asian origin institutional ceramic I\u2019ve gotten to work with in my career, which is the reason that I gravitated toward it.<\/p>\n

Chamoy has been used by a lot of modern day food makers and chefs with American nostalgic candies, like peach rings and gummy worms, and my personal favorite, Gushers. One of these food makers, Alana Solis, who\u2019s based in Tucson, runs Dirty T Tamarindo<\/a>, a chamoy candy business she started during the pandemic. It was from her that I learned the history of chamoy, and so I wanted to do a piece with her candies for a long time. And this is just a really perfect opportunity with the Talavera jar.<\/p>\n

I had pitched to Susie that it might be nice to have a second ceramic in the piece, a companion that demonstrates the origins and precursors of the blue-and-white ceramics in Mexico, a Chinese piece or something. She actually picked the one pictured here, which is also from the LACMA collection. It\u2019s a 12th century Qingbai ware prunus vase, a meiping jar. When Susie pitched it to me, I didn\u2019t even realize how perfect it was: A prunus vase is usually what they put plum blossoms in, and meiping means beautiful plum vase. It just ended up being a really, really good pick from her.<\/p>\n

CS:<\/b> You built a studio space within the gallery to create the piece. I\u2019m curious about the constraints and what was surprising for you.<\/p>\n

\"Artist \"Light <\/p>\n

Artist Stephanie Shih\u2019s makeshift set in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) David Geffen Galleries for her two-week commission project residency; Light test detail.<\/p>\n

(Stephanie Shih)<\/p>\n

SS:<\/b> I was here for two weeks. I had a friend build a wall, we painted it downstairs and then brought it in and had it in the gallery with the light coming in through the windows. They gave me a refrigerator to store all the food, because I wasn\u2019t supposed to have it out in the gallery space. We built out work tables too \u2026 it\u2019s hard to kind of imagine with all the other stuff here now.<\/p>\n

It was in December, and so the building was in several stages of installation with the art. There were just stacks of crates and boxes, which is amazing \u2014 it was very cool to just see statues half unpacked.<\/p>\n

And actually, seeing everything get installed affected my thinking about the frame. Originally I wasn\u2019t going to do a framed piece, it was just going to be on a panel. But then as I saw everything else go up, there was a weightiness to the way everything was framed and thought about. A lot of the frames are gold gilded, which are incredibly beautiful and historical. I wanted something that played off of that tradition, but using a red frame made it really obvious that it\u2019s not 100% within tradition.<\/p>\n

CS:<\/b> How does this commission fit into your practice?<\/p>\n

SS:<\/b> My work started out really thinking about the artistic references we get as people working in food and still life. So many of the references are of this very Eurocentric art historical tradition. But if you look at that tradition, many things are taken from other cultures and used to symbolize the access and wealth and value that was assigned to these objects from the perspective of European imperialists, to put it nicely. It wasn\u2019t until very recently that people were even thinking, \u201cWell, where are these things from? What other artistic traditions does that mean that we\u2019ve sort of borrowed from?\u201d And so a lot of my work thinks about responding to that, but also taking back some of that tradition to tell stories of diaspora communities today here in the U.S.<\/p>\n

From there, I\u2019ve really started thinking a lot about the construction of identity and how we get to the things that symbolize who we are, and how we use symbols as we move through the world. As a cognitive scientist and linguist, a lot of my research training is about symbols and about the construction of identity in that way.<\/p>\n

CS:<\/b> Do you think that this piece could have been made anywhere else?<\/p>\n

SS:<\/b> No, I don\u2019t think so. There\u2019s something so special about the mission with the new building, how it\u2019s so much more fluidly built and how LACMA is trying to think curatorially outside of the silos that have been set up by traditional art history. Thinking about that really, really influenced my approach to these pieces in terms of trying to collapse in each piece the timescales of historical influences and contemporary identity, but also the locality.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s stuff in \u201c\u6885\u570b (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo)\u201d that\u2019s very global and far away, but also hyper local and here in L.A. For instance, the butterfly was found by my friend just a couple miles north in WeHo while I was working at LACMA. It\u2019s native to California.<\/p>\n

Do you know who Rachel Ruysch is? She was one of the big Dutch still life painters and in some of her later work, she was able to access flowers and plants from the American West, which was really rare at that time. She has a piece with prickly pear cactus<\/a> as well as datura in it, which is crazy. We see those plants right here, but not in England and the Netherlands, where she was working at the time. Seeing that piece was part of the influence as well. In my piece, we have candy stripe ranunculus, which I was able to find for the candy. The cactus is from my backyard. There\u2019s marigold and chamomile for their significance in Mexican culture, and the hibiscus flower, which has a long history across the Pacific Rim, tracing a lot of the places that ended up with chamoy and sour plums. I wanted a little nod to Hawaii with the pineapple because that\u2019s where we also get salted plum culture.<\/p>\n

\"Artist <\/p>\n

Artist Stephanie Shih poses on set.<\/p>\n

(From the artist)<\/p>\n

CS:<\/b> As we stand and chat in front of \u201c\u6885\u570b (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo),\u201d I can\u2019t help but notice folks stopping to take it in. How is it being here and seeing people interact with the work?<\/p>\n

SS:<\/b> Oh, really fun!<\/p>\n

CS:<\/b> Do you ever want to interrupt them to answer a question you overhear?<\/p>\n

SS:<\/b> No. I think my favorite part of watching people interact with the pieces is what they bring to it. Some people see the chamoy immediately and they recognize their experiences in it, which is really lovely to see. Like, I can see someone\u2019s been pointing at it, there\u2019s a nice fingerprint mark. That\u2019s funny. Some people recognize the candy in it. Kids often ask me, \u201cHow did the gummy butterflies fly?\u201d and that\u2019s really fun to answer. I appreciate that everyone brings their own experiences to it, and that sort of completes the piece for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stephanie Shih, \u201c\u6885\u570b (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo),\u201d 2025\/2026. Archival pigment print on wood panel,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":874822,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,355606,355603,18516,1033,355607,355608,171,24255,99047,472,11641,2252,2222,355605,2192,355604,67,132,68,8066],"class_list":["post-874821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-blue-and-white-ceramic","tag-chamoy","tag-david-geffen-galleries","tag-design","tag-dirty-t-tamarindo","tag-dutch-identity","tag-entertainment","tag-front","tag-globalism","tag-history","tag-lacma","tag-life","tag-mexico","tag-new-gallery","tag-self","tag-shih-piece","tag-united-states","tag-unitedstates","tag-us","tag-work"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116768625954056284","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874821"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874821\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/874822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}