Stephanie Shih
Gilding the Lily/Corn Soup, 2023
Archival pigment print on bamboo paper, museum acrylic glazing, frame, plexi, resin, vintage wood stand
Courtesy of the artist

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025.

Shih collaborated with the Museums at Washington and Lee University in southwest Virginia to mine their Collection of Chinese Export Porcelain and create the series of works that includes Dad’s Favorite, Mondays and Gilding the Lily/Corn Soup. Choosing from a range of almost 3,000 Chinese-made ceramics, she used historical research to connect them to Europe and Asia before drawing on her own presence in contemporary America to bind everything together.

Writing about Gilding the Lily/Corn Soup, she notes that the ceramic vessel started its journey as an incense burner in China before being exported to the Netherlands. Then it went to Austria, where the Du Paquier porcelain factory designed a lid that transformed it into a soup tureen somewhere around 1735. The original blue and white decorations were joined by European additions in red and gold. The corn soup in the second photograph underscores the vessel’s current presence in the Americas. (Corn was originally cultivated in Mexico.) Recipes for corn soup and other dishes were promoted in new Asian markets after World War II to boost sales of American canned goods. The soup in this photograph was made from a recipe by Shih’s mother, an emigrant from one of those areas: Taiwan.