Trash Is on the Menu at Steph Huang’s ‘Deli’

In ‘Lili Deli’, Steph Huang’s exhibition at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the Taiwan-born, London-based artist sticks a candle in the wine bottle, so to speak, clinging to the remnants of delightful indulgence. Staging the gallery space as a makeshift ‘deli’, Huang offers the frail objects of our consumption extensions to their limited lifespans, making a quiet spectacle of commodities and waste.

Huang finds a productive tension between preservation and disposal. Located at the gallery’s entrance, Weeknight (2024) comprises a bubble of blown glass pinched between two tins emptied of their perishables (feta cheese and eggplant caponata); materials for many of the show’s standout sculptures come from Huang’s rummaging through the recycling, elevating traces of a good meal into objects of reverence. Pickle Tin Alien (2025) started life as a drum of gherkins; Huang affixed three legs to it and draped it in silk, giving it the appearance of a coffee table.

Huang’s efforts at artful conservation don’t end with the found object. Sculptures are adorned with blown-glass gherkins and asparagus, or else with bronze-cast delicacies; in Sunday Shopping List (2024), pristine bronze figs surround the twisted body of a mangled shopping cart. The sculpted sundries stocking the titular ‘deli’ may appear to claim that artful reverence can indefinitely prolong the shelf life of the delight found in such treats. In actuality, Huang’s deft material choices – threateningly fragile glass, bronze quietly oxidizing towards eventual ruin – admit that art can only ever grant a temporary reprieve from cycles of waste and loss.

Take Packaging (2025), a collage of dutifully preserved wrapping paper from an array of posh grocers and sandwich stands, bakeries and fishmongers. It captures the charm that can linger after an indulgence, but also instantiates and sits atop a hierarchy of waste that is woven through the exhibition. Multiple sculptures borrow bales of shredded paper, spirited away from the production line at a recycling plant to stand in for the architecture of Huang’s ‘deli’.

One lone bundle sits beneath an elegant glass pendant light, like an intimate dining table. Elsewhere, a large platform of these compressed reams of paper coheres a handful of sculptures together like adjacent booths at a restaurant. There is no romance to this garbage that lays bare the systems of waste that uphold our consumption; despite their temporary life as an artwork, when the show wraps the blocks of paper will be slotted seamlessly back into the pipeline toward the recycling plant, with no memory of moonlighting as bistro furniture.

Huang also makes a point of directing her critique at dynamics of waste unique to the Taiwanese context. Whereas other recent exhibitions have explored ingredients and food cultures local to the gallery, here her delicacies seem sourced from further afield – most from the sprawling pantheon of the charcuterie board. Gathering this menu in Taipei would demand a trip to Mia C’bon, the city’s unabashedly bougie import grocer. Huang squares up to the local nuances of this style of conspicuous consumption with the participatory provocation ‘Tower of Freebie’ (2025), ongoing for the exhibition’s run. It is common for Taiwanese stores to entice customers into deals with complementary merch – gifts that usually languish unused. Huang invites her audience to lend their surplus perks to a monolith of consumer excess.

However, despite skewering the issue, this work doesn’t cut as deeply as it could, only marvelling at a spectacle of waste before probably returning it to the back of the cupboard – albeit, possibly of a different museumgoer – in a game of pass-the-parcel with accumulated crap. There is no functional gesture at reuse or redistribution. Telling, perhaps, of the impulse to hoard the surplus of moments of gleeful consumption that Huang weaves so poetically throughout her ‘deli’.

Steph Huang, ‘Lili Deli’ is on view at Taipei Fine Arts Museum until 22 June