Lost in LACMA's new galleries, a serene still life serves as a compass

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Stephanie Shih, “梅國 (Still life with chamoy and Dirty T Tamarindo),” 2025/2026. Archival pigment print on wood panel, varnish, glue, acrylic, frame. 38.25×48.25×3.75. (From the artist) Much has been written about the experience of aimlessness in the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, but it is another thing to experience it firsthand. The meandering floor plan, with its rooms of various sizes and orientations alongside their resulting passageways and corners, demands that you wander, not map, your perusal of the galleries. As a result, a visitor can easily feel disoriented, or in my case, a touch deconstructed. A little depersonalized, if you will.

Fortuitously, I was there to meet with multidisciplinary artist Stephanie Shih, whose photo-based compositions have the opposite effect, grounding the viewer in their personhood and experience. Her still lifes are made both beautiful and meaningful through their intentional arrangement of specific food, florals and ephemera, touching on diasporic understandings of self, Western and European appropriations of the “exotic” and the juxtaposition of the natural with the fabricated. In other words, to view a Shih piece is to collaborate with the artist on reconstructing or, in some cases, reclaiming an understanding of place and self.