Flourish: The Aline Smithson Next Generation Award

About

LACP is thrilled to announce a solo exhibition by Stephanie Shih, the first winner of the Aline Smithson Next Generation Award.

Stephanie Shih is a visual still life artist (photo-based and multimedia installations), known for her painterly use of shadow applied to playful perspectives on food. As a second generation Taiwanese-Chinese American, Shih explores themes of contemporary and historical cultural dynamics of the diaspora through still life creations, drawing on her background in semiotics and research to recode the symbologies of the still life canon.

Flourish explores Shih’s work in the last five years, seeking to articulate central themes and approaches. The exhibition offers a cacophonous celebration of the complexities of Asian-American and immigrant experiences. Shih’s exhibition space refuses the surgically-clean white cube, by (re)introducing color, beauty, emotion, imperfection, and the narratives of culturally othered communities. So often the cultural and personal traumas of these communities are diminished in institutional spaces. Shih responds instead–often with collaborators from the AAPI community–with an unbridled maximalism dedicated to Asian diasporic presence and excellence, understanding at the same time that joy goes hand in hand with the messy multiplicities of human narratives.

Beyond still life, Shih’s work also speaks directly to the presence of the Asian-American experience in institutional archives in the west, by mining and exhuming objects and observing both the point of view of the collection and the various histories of the archived pieces. In Long Time No See (2023-2024) she anchors artifacts found in the Asian export porcelain collection at the Museums at Washington & Lee as diasporic objects that are interwoven in an intricate web of personal experiences, materials histories and the natural world around southwestern Virginia, where the ceramics now reside.

In Asian American Still Life (2020-ongoing), Shih claims a space for the Asian-American cultural experience, seen through an Asian-American lens. Questioning the idea of “All American,” the series reminds of the complex multi-cultural traditions that inform how California experiences its own culinary culture. The series features home comfort foods from Shih’s upbringing as a Taiwanese-Chinese American—foods that are derided as “strange” in the U.S. but hold great significance in Chinese culture. The artist partnered with Asian American small business owners, foregrounding hyper-local-yet-diasporic food practices that are embedded in local fabrics of personal, familial and collective experiences.

The Aline Smithson Next Generation Award is designed to empower and promote emerging, female identified photographic artists based in Los Angeles. LACP will organize five solo exhibitions for five artists for a period of five years, while providing curatorial guidance and professional development support. The artists are selected through a nomination process. The award is created in the spirit of Aline Smithson’s commitment to nurturing the photographic arts and uplifting the next generation of female identified artists. To pledge your support, click here.

Bio

Stephanie Shih is a visual still life artist (photo and multimedia installation), known for her painterly use of shadow applied to playful perspectives on food. Shih started making photographs with her dad’s half-frame camera on childhood road trips, but only returned to photography seriously while in graduate school. At the time, she moonlighted as a wedding cake maker, and translating the fantastical experience of food to the visual image has been a driving thrughline of her work ever since.

As a second generation Taiwanese-Chinese American, Shih explores themes of contemporary and historical cultural dynamics of the diaspora through her still life creations, drawing on her background in semiotics and research to recode the symbologies of the still life canon. Shih has completed residencies at the Oak Spring Garden Foundation Interdisciplinary Residency (2024), Museums at Washington and Lee (2023), and Joshua Tree Highlands Artist Residency (2022). Her work has been exhibited in solo and group shows at venues including Hashimoto Contemporary, Griffin Museum of Photography, USC Pacific Asia Museum, Museums at Washington and Lee, and The Royal Photographic Society. Shih’s photography has been featured in outlets including Lenscratch, Bloomberg Businessweek, Gastronomica, Buzzfeed News, and Los Angeles Times.

Shih is from the San Francisco Bay Area and currently lives and works in Los Angeles. When not in the studio or kitchen creating, she is a professor at the University of Southern California.

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