Shiya Zeng, “Forgotten Chinatown”

Shiya Zeng exhibits unfamiliar magic around the perimeter of what I like to call the Sunset Gallery, at Finch Lane. Then, to show just how magical it is, she contrasts it with a relatively mundane counterpoint that appears to restore her audience to Salt Lake City, though to a place she has transformed. Magic is something artists achieved in the past by virtue of art’s inherent powers, but which seems to have fallen out of favor in an age of blunt social commentary. In a few moments and with fewer than 20 works, though, she dissolves that misapprehension, along with a few others.

Zeng opens with nine stoneware sculptures that conjure places and things from her memory, though as is often the case with memories, especially childhood ones, some imagination is also involved. The first, “Forgotten Chinatown,” places five individual buildings together on a newspaper, opened to the classified section and folded there, and next to them a plum. This fruit, because it blossoms between seasons, is taken to symbolize Spring, which as the season of new birth is appropriate to someone who, as a child, emigrated to Utah from her native Guangzhou, a large city in Southern China near the transitional, administrative district of Hong Kong. The plum is also a sign of health and a reminder to live in a new, better way.

The next, “Altar Table,” presents model foodstuffs and tableware, echoed by the actual table on which they sit. If it hasn’t already happened, at this point the work begins to charm the viewer. The next two works, “Terrace, Utah,” and “Golden Spike,” advance the artist’s claim to an historical connection between Chinese people and her new home. The story of the building of the transcontinental railroad, largely with Chinese labor, is another tale of exploitation and ingratitude, one in which the completion of the work by “guest” labor was followed by the Exclusion Act, which expelled the workers and their families for decades. Yet Zeng drains the story of resentment and accusation, even as she restores the Chinese presence that eventually led to toleration.

Shiya Zeng, “Altar Table”

Her next work, “The Jade Cafe,” adds a soupçon of Hollywood magic to her restored Chinatown. Where the buildings in the first work were solid objects, this one is a facade only. Behind a brick planter, filled with homely plants, a sign in the front window reads “Open.” On a more personal note, I was reminded of the way the town of Ephraim was rocked in the first decade of the new millennium by news that a Chinese restaurant was to open in that tiny college town, which doubled in size every year when academic immigrants filled it. Odd to discover how a town built by European immigrants had felt itself incomplete until this additional import arrived.

Appropriately, “Homework” invokes the simultaneously contained and expanding world of the student. These tableaux recall the lives of Zeng, her family, and her countryfolk in Utah, but by giving them not just their subject matter, but a child-like presentation, she not only invokes her own experience, growing up on the margin of a strange, new home, but also the viewer’s own feelings and memories which, though likely to be different, nevertheless involve a world of placement and scale: everything was larger in the present, but has become smaller, with fewer specific details, in the past.

Shiya Zeng, “The Jade Cafe”

Shiya Zeng, “Homework”

The remainder of Past, Present, and Future contains nine giclée images of the transient reality of the local Chinatown. Their captions tell the story with restraint: “1987-2020” on one, “Relocated to 115 W 9000 S, Sandy Renamed Super China Market and later Ocean Mart in 2011” on another. “Relocated due to rent increases;” “Burned down and rebuilt as Kim Lona Fresh Market;” “Relocated;” “Relocated to 1701 S State Street.”

A viewer might walk along this wall and fail to notice the litany in fine print: not just of change, but of an ongoing struggle for some sort of lasting future. At some point, the use of media, from mock-amateur ceramics to these formal prints, makes a vital point. The story of the Taishanese language, belonging to the third-largest city in China, yet having “little mutual intelligibility” with the Cantonese spoken a dozen miles away, is too complex to tell here, but while we, her audience, are fluent in many visual dialects, including a child’s charming models and an adult’s remote, revealing prints, there’s a danger of remaining oblivious to the demands other languages make on those who lack the convenience of having only one, when it’s the most common: the one “everyone speaks.”

Shiya Zeng’s deft hands and supple mind work a subtle magic, through which a vital, if largely invisible part of Utah begins to appear through a mist of ignorance and neglect.

Shiya Zeng, “Ocean City Market”

Shiya Zeng: Past, Present and Future, Finch Lane Gallery, Salt Lake City, through June 7

All images courtesy the author

Geoff Wichert

Geoff Wichert objects to the term critic. He would rather be thought of as a advocate on behalf of those he writes about.