Connie Zheng

Guest Passage, 2023. Dimensions variable. Installation view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (CA). Photography by Jenna Garrett.

Created for the Bay Area Now 9 triennial at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Guest Passage is a double-sided piece comprising of two different room-sized installations sharing a wall. I conceptualized them as Side A and Side B of a vinyl album, a “Day” side and a “Night” side, and the work as a whole moves between day and night, rest and activation, and different timescales — clock-time as well as mythological time. Each side of the installation, titled How to Make a Golden State and Rivermouth Songs, is anchored in histories of Asian farmworkers in California, as well as the three major rivers in Northern California. A sound composition comprised of field recordings I made at the rivermouths of the Sacramento, San Joaquin, and Russian Rivers threads through both sides of the installation, rooting it in the water that sustains our agricultural industries and literally feed us. 

My intention for this project was for visitors to inhabit a dispersed and altered sense of time that threads the past through the present and invites visitors to consider what it means to be a guest somewhere, and to be treated—or to treat others—as a perpetual guest.

Rivermouth Songs, 2023. Dimensions variable. Installation view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photography by Jenna Garrett. Vinyl design by Jane Trieu. Text by Connie Zheng, after Pauline Oliveiros.

Visitors who enter the gallery first approach the ‘Night’ side of the installation, titled Rivermouth Songs. This side of the installation takes the form of a Chinese restaurant-style table set for a meal. The work aims to invite viewers into a dreamlike realm, where the familiar and unfamiliar merge in a surreal atmosphere. The set table — for me, a deeply personal symbol of home and communal celebration — symbolizes the gathering of diasporic communities, cultural connections, and shared experiences. A twelve-channel sound installation, comprised of speakers hidden in teapots and under the table, combines field recordings of the Pacific Ocean and the San Joaquin, Sacramento, and Russian Rivers into asynchronous loops that never match up in the same way more than once. Visitors are invited to sit down at the table and to listen closely to the sounds emanating from the table and dinnerware, following the instructions for a Collective Guest Composition (after Pauline Oliveros) on the blue wall.  

In the background, there is a video projection of my garden (at the time of making this work — I moved not long after installing this piece at YBCA) changing over the course of a year. The projection is composed of over 1,000 stills of 35mm photographs that I took every day for two years, soaked in leftover food from my refrigerator, and developed by hand. Overlaid on top of these stop-motion, decomposing timelapses are often hand-drawn animations of speculative seed germinations, which aim to infuse a highly personal, intimate sense of place with a sense of alienness.

How to Make a Golden State, 2023. Dimensions variable. Installation view at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Photography by Jenna Garrett.

On the other side of Guest Passage is the ‘Day’ side of the installation, titled How to Make a Golden State — after the map (see here) that anchors not just this ‘room’, but the installation as a whole. It employs didactic elements to inform visitors about the rich history of Asian farmworkers in California and to invite viewers to contemplate the intersections of culture, history and environment in the Golden State. The map, also titled How to Make a Golden State, links this history to broader geopolitical forces driving agricultural development in the United States and points at the ways in which Asian-American history in the US is also tightly braided with American labor history, countering mainstreamed narratives of Asian laborers as silent, invisible, and marginal. 

Double-sidedness and duality are both defining characteristics of my maps and creative work as a whole. To me, maps are fascinating because they are one of the oldest interfaces for human interaction with their environments. Without a map, how would we know how to begin to orient ourselves to an unfamiliar place? Despite their colonial and extractive histories, I think maps have incredible possibility for re-orienting ourselves to our environment in such generative and productively alien ways — they can teach us how to locate ourselves in a place, both literally and psychically, and to relate to it in ways that actually affect the landscape. I see each of my map projects as an index of different ideas, questions and narratives for a ‘problem-space’, and the surrounding installation of a map as various nodes of the map itself.

For example, the two small collage drawings to the side show a more personal take on mapping place, as they depict a soundwalk score through my garden and a garden planting map. The shelves on the left side of the installation include jars of Asian vegetable seeds for visitors to take, and (for a brief period) there were free risograph prints on the table that showed an abbreviated list of ‘greatest hits’ from the larger map on the wall.

The ‘Day’ and ‘Night’ sides of the installation are bridged in the middle by Yield, a self-portrait triptych on drafting film, which interpolates a semi-fractured likeness of my figure (in varying modes of decay and regeneration) as connective tissue.