Untitled Art, Houston 2026 : Sandeep Mukherjee, Stephanie Shih
Portrait Without Portraiture
Sandeep Mukherjee and Stephanie Shih
Booth B23, a poco art
October 1–4, 2026
George R. Brown Convention Center, Hall A3, Houston, TX
VIP & Press Preview
Thursday, October 1, 3–9 PM
General Admission
Friday–Saturday, October 2–3, 11 AM–7 PM
Sunday, October 4, 11 AM–5 PM
At Untitled Art, Houston 2026, a poco art presents Portrait Without Portraiture, bringing together Sandeep Mukherjee and Stephanie Shih. Their practices appear radically different—Mukherjee works through abstraction, while Shih creates highly constructed, photo-based still lifes—yet both begin with the same question: where does the body begin, where does it end, and how might it be represented without becoming fixed into a likeness?
In Mukherjee’s work, the body becomes unstable and expansive. His Body Diagram paintings begin with his own movements and postures, translated through repeated gestures upon responsive surfaces such as Dura-Lene. Their overlapping contours resist anatomy; inside and outside pass through one another. Skin becomes a porous threshold opening toward architecture, landscape, and the cosmos. The body emerges as a field of movement, pressure, and energy—something shaped by space while simultaneously shaping it.
Shih approaches the body through its disappearance. Food, historic porcelain, childhood photographs, flowers, domestic objects, and restaurant wares bearing auspicious motifs familiar from Chinese American restaurants enter a still-life tradition once shaped by colonial trade and the display of Asian objects as exotic commodities. In Shih’s hands, still life becomes a form of Asian American portraiture: bodies reconstructed through what they eat, touch, inherit, purchase, remember, and carry across cultures. These objects hold the labor, memory, and aspirations of immigrant families and small businesses whose lives have transformed the American cultural landscape.
Shih also turns the European still-life tradition back upon itself. Asian porcelain and other commodities once appeared as symbols of colonial access and wealth, displayed while the people and cultures behind them remained anonymous. In Shih’s work, the objects recover their histories and their agency. They are glamorous, humorous, complicated, and proudly Asian American. The gaze is returned.
For the Houston presentation, the artists’ works will be installed across the booth like a constellation, allowing bodily contours, celestial forms, porcelain vessels, flowers, and reflective surfaces to echo across their differences. The eye moves between the body made abstract and the body made absent: Mukherjee dissolves its boundaries, while Shih reconstructs it through material traces. The installation asks viewers to move through these relationships rather than encounter two separate bodies of work.
Across the booth, a quiet animism takes hold. Matter lives, objects remember, and the body extends into everything surrounding it. The works bloom and gather—intimate and cosmic, abstract and vividly present—unfolding as a Sky Full of Stars within a Body Diagram.
