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.
