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Asian Porcelain Recontextualized Museums At W&L Artist-In-Residence Creates First Show
The Museums at Washington and Lee University will present “LONG TIME NO SEE ( 好久不見 ),” a solo exhibition by the Museums’ inaugural artist-in-residence, Stephanie Shih.
The exhibit will be on view from Aug. 28 through June 7, 2025, in the Reeves Museum of Ceramics, with an artist’s talk and reception slated for Sept. 26 at 5:30 p.m.
The exhibition and reception events are free and open to the public.
Shih ( 史欣雲 ) is a secondgeneration Taiwanese-Chinese American still life artist, photographer, and professor of Linguistics at the University of Southern California.
Her “LONG TIME NO SEE ( 好久不見 )” is an original collection of 15 life-size photography and video-based still life installations that surface unacknowledged histories in the Museums’ Chinese export collection. Each multimedia artwork was created on-site by Shih, a photographer and visual artist whose work simultaneously pays tribute to still life traditions and reclaims them to pave new ground for contemporary representations of Asian American narratives.
Mining the Museums’ historic collection of Asian export porcelain, Shih unearthed insights on commerce, labor, imperialism, race, migration, identity and belonging, and places the ceramics in dialogue with food, flowers, personal items, and found objects of significance to Asian American histories and communities.
In these arrangements, Shih recontextualizes the ceramics and transforms their status as luxury objects of possession into diasporic objects that reflect the histories and contexts of the people who crafted them. Each tableau reckons with tensions between past and present, belonging and alienation, presence and absence.
Shih’s artwork installations pair altered still life photographs with corresponding objects from the Reeves Collection of Ceramics. Each altered photograph features a hand-carved void where the ceramics would otherwise appear in the image. Presented alongside the physical museum object in the installation, this pairing creates a deliberate interplay between the physical and the photographic.
“We are thrilled to present Stephanie Shih’s remarkably profound project, a concentric exploration of our ceramics collection that elevates our Museums as a site for reflection and critical inquiry,” said Isra El-beshir, director of the Museums at W&L. “LONG TIME NO SEE’ is designed to foster historical empathy, presenting an innovative and nuanced interpretation of the past that resonates with the present.”
The exhibition is organized by El-beshir; Nalleli Guillen, associate director of curatorial affairs; and Elizabeth Spear, curator of academic engagement, in collaboration with curatorial consultants Jacqueline Chao, the Cecil and Ida Green Curator of Asian Art at the Dallas Museum of Art; Rachel Du, Chinese art specialist at Bonhams auction house; and Kelly Fu, a doctoral candidate at Stanford University.
The Museums at W&L are open to the public Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information and programming details, visit museums.wlu.edu.
