Stephanie Shih
Ugly Duckling, 2021
Archival Pigment print on bamboo paper, wood panel, varnish, glue, acrylics
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.

Ugly Duckling uses the visual conventions of European still lifes to present a Chinese celebratory meal of roast duck sourced from Californian restaurants. Stephanie Shih (史欣雲) makes a point of crediting them. “Cantonese roast duck from Sam Woo BBQ and peking duck from Moon House.”

“Much of the diasporic experience involves grappling with the continued amputation of the context of our origins, histories, and cultural practices when we are perceived as cultural ‘others’ in American society,” said Shih in an interview with Lenscratch. As a professor of linguistics as well as an artist, she notes that still lifes constitute visual languages, with distinct culturally-specific traditions and references. “Still lifes are the one genre historically that comes absolutely loaded with symbolism, with signs in the art that communicate messages to the viewer. There are flies in classic European religious still lifes that symbolize mortality and decay in contrast to godliness. In historical Chinese art, rebuses–‘visual puns’–were incredibly common: for example, the combination of peonies and roosters symbolize a well-wishing for achieving success because the words for peonies and roosters sound similar to the words for prestige, honor, and expectation." By merging symbols from multiple traditions across Asia and Europe into a united American whole, her work resists the process of amputation.