TCC Sculpture Blog: Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco is a visual artist who’s recent work uses the tactics of bootlegging, reappropriation, and fictional fabrications to address issues of cultural biography, labor, and economic globalization. Working primarily in sculpture and installation, her objects mistranslate and misappropriate iconic symbols, creating frictions between high ideals and everyday materials. This has included re-creating several 1950s Modernist furniture pieces by French designer Charlotte Perriand but using cast-off material and rubbish in Beijing, China; starting a global collaborative project with crochet crafters to counterfeit high-end consumer goods; photographing models of Stonehenge made from cheap Asian imported food products; and searching for fragments of the Berlin Wall in her immediate surroundings in an attempt to revisit the moment of capitalism's supposed global triumph.

Born in the Philippines, she received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, and included in exhibitions at P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, SFMOMA, The Contemporary Museum Honolulu, The San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and the California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, among others. In 2007 she led counterfeiting workshops at artspaces in Istanbul, Beijing, and Manila. In October 2009 she presented a parasitic art counterfeiting event, "COPYSTAND: An Autonomous Manufacturing Zone" for Frieze Projects, London, as well as contributed proxy sculptures for P.S.1/MoMA's joint exhibition, "1969." She has taught at Stanford University, The California College of the Arts, UC Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University. A recipient of a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, she lives and works in San Francisco (Stephaniesyjuco.com)