‘It all started with dumplings,’ says New York-based artist Stephanie Shih. ‘I was an amateur potter – making mugs, painting on plates – then one day I realised that clay had an elasticity that reminded me of dumpling dough. So I started folding it just as you’d make a real dumpling – I’d take a little ball of clay, roll it out into a circle and then fold it.’
Little did she know that this was the start of a cross-continental journey of discovery: from dumplings, the artist progressed to making ceramic versions of a variety of Asian groceries she had grown up with in her half-Taiwanese, half-Chinese household in New Jersey in the 1980s and 90s – ‘the kind of items you might see in someone else’s house and immediately think, “we understand each other, even though we’re strangers”.’ Polling her Instagram followers introduced her to a range of products she hadn’t encountered before – Indonesian rice, Malaysian soy sauce and British-origin groceries that are popular in Hong Kong, such as Ribena.