Alexander Berggruen is pleased to present Stephanie H. Shih: Domestic Bliss. This exhibition will open Wednesday, January 22, 2025 with a 5-7 pm reception at the gallery (1018 Madison Avenue, Floor 3, New York, NY).

Stephanie H. Shih’s hand-painted ceramic sculptures of 1990s consumer goods playfully evince the tensions in modern family life. Through the artifacts of a single household, she evokes the complementary and contradictory politics around gender roles, sexuality, and family structure. Her ceramic renderings of cleaning supplies, exercise equipment, and foods of convenience are connected by an emotional proximity to the body and self, yet, seen together, expose the underlying conflicts of domesticity under consumerism. Pitted against one another are convenience and wellness, lust and loneliness. 

Shih’s starting point for Domestic Bliss was a single object: the 1998 self-help book Divorce for Dummies. She found a dark humor in the triangle-headed For Dummies cartoon mascot, best known for his computer expertise, proferring advice about the failure of one’s marriage. In the show, the sculpture stands on a bookshelf with other classic titles for those in midlife crisis: Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus; Women Who Love Too Much; and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Nearby, a broken wine glass sits in a dustpan—the detritus, perhaps, of a marital dispute.

Concurrent with the divorce boom of the 1980s and ‘90s were competing food trends of fat-free everything, ultra-processed junk food, and, naturally, fat-free ultra-processed junk food: SnackWells fat-free cookies in the pantry, ham and cheese Hot Pockets in the freezer, a two-liter Diet Coke in the fridge. The tableau titled Nuclear Family presents a portrait of a family as their respective frozen meals atop a microwave, ready to be ‘nuked’. Here, Mother is a modestly portioned box of Stouffers cheese manicotti, Child is a Kid Cuisine meal of chicken nuggets, and Father is the eponymous Hungry-Man, his compartmentalized tray spinning slowly in the yellow glow of the microwave light.

In another tableau titled Chores is a final book—an erotic novel splayed on an ironing board with an iron. In this context, sex is presented alongside other ‘domestic duties’. Elsewhere, a box of Viagra stands near a flaccid loaf of Wonder Bread drooping off its plinth, while body enhancers targeted at women are found in the form of a Thighmaster with Suzanne Somers’ beaming smile and a full set of Buns of Steel VHS tapes. In this home, there is a sense of corporeal self-loathing for both men and women, though problems and solutions differ greatly.

For this show, Shih scoured eBay listings for photo references and exact dimensions of discontinued packaging in order to faithfully sculpt each object in its era-appropriate likeness. Each piece was painted with underglaze and given a finish to mimic the feel of the object’s original material—matte for a cardboard box of Frosted Flakes and glossy for the shine of a crushed Bud Light can. Once fired, she enhanced the illusion with non-ceramic materials. For the liquid elements of spilled wine in Dissolution and the ramen broth in Maruchan Instant Lunch, Shih employed dyed resin. Other media include glass, steel, and electrical elements for the microwave interior in Nuclear Family. 

While trompe l'oeil food sculptures date back to the 18th century, when they were a display of wealth, Shih’s ceramic foods reflect a different type of economic status. The foods in Domestic Bliss depict a decidedly middle-class, mass-market, suburban lifestyle marked by disappointment and disillusionment. Though the show is set in the ‘90s of the artist’s own childhood, its sense of discord is hardly something of the past. In Domestic Bliss, Shih’s sculptures reflect the uneasy relationship between obligation and the self within the often confining structures of modern family life.

Press release by Kirsten Cave.

Stephanie H. Shih (b. 1986, Philadelphia, PA) 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 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. Shih is currently based in Brooklyn, NY.

This is the gallery's first solo show with the artist. The gallery included her work in our presentation at the Dallas Art Fair (April 4-7, 2024) and the group show Levity (July 13-August 29, 2023).