Art Review

SJICA's 'City Beneath the City' Unearths Lost History

By Christian L. Frock | Jun 27, 2012

City Beneath the City at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art presents salvaged artifacts from the city's late 19th century Market Street Chinatown, one of the largest Chinese communities in the country at the time, second only to San Francisco. From the 1860s to its complete destruction by a single devastating instance of arson in 1887, this densely populated neighborhood was a defining characteristic of San Jose. Much of its legacy was lost until nearly a century later, in the mid 1980s, when the area was redeveloped and these objects, among many, were excavated at the site that now hosts the Fairmont Hotel. To date, nearly 7,000 objects and more than 26,000 fragments from this discovery have been cataloged by Stanford University, accounting for less than half of what is now known as the Market Street Chinatown Archaeological Project. For this exhibition, artist Rene Yung mined this historic collection to create a subtly poignant installation that complicates our sense of place through an understanding of lost and rediscovered history.

San Francisco-based Rene Yung, an artist whose work traverses public art and design, explores narrative and its relationship to cultural memory through socially engaged projects. Chinese Whispers, an ongoing project since 2007, is a community-based storytelling project that explores the memories of Chinese immigrants who helped build the transcontinental railroad and the American West. Other recent works include a studied examination of gentrification in San Francisco's Mission District with Southern Exposure and a public art project in East Oakland with a participatory web archive of local history. Seemingly at the core of Yung's practice is a desire to recognize the numerous truths and histories embedded in place, giving each strand of memory its own integrity even when all that remains are fragments.

Photo: David Pace, courtesy SJICA

The significance of the objects in City Beneath the City is lost without a larger context -- to fully appreciate the installation, read the short text in the gallery. Organized to symbolically reflect on traditional Chinese homes, quotidian objects are presented on pedestals arranged systematically in the space. Cultural specificity aside, the ubiquity of these items illuminates commonalities across different cultures throughout history. One encounters building materials, house wares, personal effects, and, lastly, an extensive display of rice bowls. A sound installation in the vicinity of the rice bowls -- the volume too subtle to be heard by most -- emits a number of different voices asking, "Have you eaten rice yet?" Intended as a salutation, this phrase equates wellbeing with access to sustenance and references the famine that forced many to leave China in the late 1800s.

Photo: David Pace, courtesy SJICA

Fragments from windows, brick and wood speak to an architectural history, while spare objects such as toothbrushes, buttons, and a forlorn porcelain doll leg allude to the everyday aspects of domestic life in Market Street Chinatown. Further a mix of Euro-American and "chinoiserie" dishware exemplifies the adaptive life of immigrants. Chinoiserie, a European aesthetic dating from the 17th century, is a style of ornamentation intended to appear Chinese, absent of any real cultural significance. For a Western audience, it is, in effect, Chinese-like without being authentic. The use of these objects within the Chinese American community reflects a weary allowance for this ignorance in the face of practical concerns, including acclimation and survival amidst racial bias, and echoes the nuanced existence of otherness within native and adopted identities. In an essay written for the exhibition, art historian Dr. Jordana Moore Saggese notes that these objects, alongside imported European whiteware, "point to the impossibility of a singular identity or meaning in the context of migration."

Photo: David Pace, courtesy SJICA

This impossibility is at the core of Yung's investigations. City Beneath the City was created in response to the forthcoming ZERO1 art and technology biennial and its exploration of the area before it was known as Silicon Valley. Despite an accepted linear understanding of the past, this theme anticipates the wealth of layered narratives that shape our understanding of place. Unearthing even a small shard from a by-gone era can lead to a broad investigation of the past and its relationship to the present. Understanding the larger context of history is a form of consciousness -- like technology, once considered it should only advance. Mining the legacy of where we stand is, perhaps, the way forward in a country still reconciling its relationship to immigrants, a pressing social issue beyond the revelations of even the most advanced technology.

City Beneath the City is on view at San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art through September 16, 2012. For more information visit sjica.org.

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