Shi Huang

"On the MENU" Series: A Visual Allegory of Food Alienation 

Shi's "On the MENU" series reexamines the distorted relationship between humans and food in the industrial age with a playful yet incisive approach. By absurdly combining salt dough with metal, the series constructs seemingly appetizing yet inherently threatening "food"—serving as both symbols of temptation and metaphors of alienation.  

The artist chose salt dough, a traditional material for children's crafts, as the medium, leveraging its malleability to sculpt everyday food items like roast chicken, bread, and pudding. Yet, she deliberately embeds "unnatural" elements—metal skeletons, red diamonds, and jagged structures—into these forms. The fluffy bread pendant conceals cold, hard diamonds within, the melting pudding ring reveals exposed wires at its edges, and the ketchup droplet earring dangles with a glaring red diamond embedded inside. This material clash creates a striking cognitive dissonance: just as viewers are drawn in by the lifelike appearance, the abrupt intrusion of industrial elements shatters the "edibility" of the food, exposing its true nature as a product of consumer society.  

The roast chicken brooch is perhaps the most impactful piece in the series—its golden, crispy skin contrasts horrifyingly with the exposed metal skeleton beneath the torn flesh, resembling a dissection of industrialized food production. Through this visual contradiction, Huang Shi questions how modern humans unknowingly consume food that has been mechanically disassembled, reassembled, and packaged. Meanwhile, the teardrop-shaped ketchup earring, precariously dangling, satirizes the performative illusion of "freshness" and "naturalness" in consumer culture.  

By transposing food symbols from the plate to wearable art, "On the MENU" elevates the ordinary into the realm of high art. These pieces are no longer mere adornments but a diagnostic report handed to contemporary society—wrapped in humorous forms yet carrying sharp, probing questions.