sculpted clay pieces for her first solo exhibition in Los Angeles — currently on display in Chinatown’s Stanley’s gallery — she crowdsourced ideas from her 20,000-plus social media followers.
Shih’s “New World Mall” exhibition is a collection of 30 life-size ceramic and hand-painted replicas of these nostalgic products. There’s a Carnation Sweetened Condensed Milk tin, a nod to its use in Vietnamese coffee and Hong Kong-style toast. A ceramic Libby’s Vienna Sausage can represents its role in Filipino meatloaf and Korean budae-jjigae . And a bottle of Heinz ketchup stands in as an essential ingredient for Japanese spaghetti.
He reached out to Shih last December, and she started working on the pieces that touch upon the ideas of migration and colonization. Except for the Spam and Ferrero Rocher chocolates, everything was made specifically for this new exhibition. The collection includes a blue Royal Dansk cookie tin, a bottle of Maggi seasoning and a bag of King’s Hawaiian sweet rolls.
She spends hours searching Google Images and old commercials on YouTube to get the details right. For this series, she even bought a 1990s Ovaltine canister from eBay. It was still half-full of the original chocolate milk powder.After Shih sculpts one of her clay pieces, she paints it with meticulous detail using underglaze before its first firing in the kiln. The next round of glaze depends on the material — glass or paper or metal, for example — used in the original product.
Shih wanted to go to art school but her parents didn’t approve of it. She attended Boston University and then ended up working as a copywriter and creative director at tech companies for a decade.
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