Public Parking Publication | Manitoba

Parking Lot is our lax interview series where we get to really know a creative. We get to learn about what they've been up to creatively, some random facts about them, some telling ones, and just about anything else that comes up. In this installment we speak with Toronto based artist Shellie Zhang

We first got in contact with Zhang right around the onset of US presidential elections late October into early November. In our chat we find out how the US's new presidential administration personally affects Zhang, her experiences growing up between China, the US and Canada, where she'd like to see her creative pursuits go, some of her earliest creative memories, and also we talk about her ongoing photo series that tracks the history of a Chinese delicacy that has over the years been denigrated--among other talking points.

zhang:

"i don’t know that I am easily adaptable – it is more of a choice between adapting or getting left behind. I think starting out my Western experience in Baltimore made me quickly aware of my class and identity because it would be suddenly cited and sometimes used against me. I spent a lot of my early years in Canada and the US trying to better assimilate and move away from my Chinese heritage. In my more recent life, I am retracing my steps, relearning histories, customs, and traditions as a means to re-familiarize myself with what I lost and forgot. In my work, I am also interested in exploring the social and personal factors, which led to this type of self-erasure."

PP: How are you doing these days?

SZ: Exhausted yet ready. First week post-election has been draining. I feel as if I am simultaneously mourning, scared and ready to fight. I am thankful for kindness because I have experienced some incredible tenderness from those close to me and also from strangers. This past week I have locked eyes with so many people on the subway as we both stare a moment longer and exchange smiles. I feel as if we are all draining ourselves to check in with one another. I feel motivated to create work, dialogue and actions that keep this momentum and hope going for those that seek it.

PP: Canada and America have pretty close relationship so when there's a change in either state, it has its side effects. How do you see the results of the election personally/directly affecting you? Where’s how you feel about the results come from?

SZ: My father works in Michigan and goes there daily. Michigan and Detroit really get a bad rep because of the area’s poverty and crime, but what scares me most about my father commuting there every day is that this is the place where two white men were given no jail time after hunting down and killing an Asian man in cold blood with a baseball bat. Vincent Chin’s death was motivated by xenophobic hate, ignorance and lack of resources available to the people of this region. I am scared to think of the hatred that will arise as the area continues to be neglected and who the blame will be pushed upon.

I keep seeing and hearing this post-election trend in Canada about how much better we are as a state. This really bothers me because one, how it is helpful to assert whatever privilege we have to those fearing for their lives in the US, and two, we really aren’t the US’s morally superior neighbours. Flint has no water, neither do the majority of the Indigenous communities in Canada; Water protectors are protesting the North Dakota Pipeline with their lives and Trudeau just approved two here; Americans voted for Trump, we voted for Ford.

Most times when I critique the state in conversations with settlers who were born here, I can see and hear their confusion and resentment at me for speaking against a country that I should be thankful to have been let into – as if vocalizing a desire for Canada to better itself is a right reserved only for those who are truly “Canadian”. Canada and America bear striking negative similarities but as a collective we are quicker to forget.

PP: How would you say your year was?

SZ: The year has been a series of perpetual ups and downs and a great year for reexamining my self worth. Slowly I’m learning to negotiate my interests and contributions to center in on projects that I am committed to being involved in. Previously, opportunities were slim and I was living under the harmful misconception that exposure is exposure and that you have to pay your dues. I’m slowly starting to realize that focusing my time and energy only towards projects that I am interested in is a form of self-care and development.

PP: You recently visited New York how was your trip there?

SZ: Amazing as ever. When I was little I first went to NY for some type of immigration paperwork and I absolutely despised the city. Everything was too large, loud and chaotic for me, piled on top of the fact that I did not understand English coherently yet. It was very much like the episode of the Simpsons where Homer visits the city and hates it.

Now, I try to make the most of my short trips there. The main motivation behind this trip was for me to visit MOCA to see this exhibition on Chinese food narratives through the voices of 33 Asian chefs. I’m currently working on a long term project about the history of MSG and the stories presented through this show parallel a lot of thoughts I have about food history and identity. The highlight of this recent venture was being able to visit Wing and Wong Co, NY Chinatown’s oldest shop that specializes in hand painted ceramics. Their store also does a lot of public programming to address the gentrification of the area and the history of Mott street. The family who runs the shop was so kind and I am such big fans of what they do. You walk in and you just get this sense of immense legacy and warmth. My friend Mohammad jokingly mentioning that that this may be the last time he could visit the US. It breaks my heart to think how much NY may change the next time I visit if I am able to go.

PP: How has it been being out of school the last couple years and making your own independent work in Toronto? How easy or difficult is it to focus on making your own work?

SZ: The program I came out of was very small and I was very involved with the insular University world, participating in student unions, clubs, committees, etc. As a result, it was a bit of a shock when suddenly all those ties were cut off as I was thrust into the real real world, unemployable with debt hanging over my head. The initial hardest thing was to be able to make time to create work when other commitments and concerns were looming over me. Grads fresh out of school aren’t eligible for a lot of funding so I worked various jobs and internships, eventually learning that I needed to set aside time in the studio as I would with any other obligation. Creating work needed to be something that I would not negotiate myself out of and eventually it became second nature. I was fortunate enough to keep in touch with friends and peers also in the arts, which helped with sharing resources, having discussions and motivating one another.

"...opportunities were slim and I was living under the harmful misconception that exposure is exposure and that you have to pay your dues. I’m slowly starting to realize that focusing my time and energy only towards projects that I am interested in is a form of self-care and development."

PP: How do you think you've matured creatively with your own work since being out of school? How do you think your time at UofT help shape your artistic development?

SZ: I think since being out of school I’ve had the time to reflect and narrow in on what I hope to do as an artist and what I am interested in. Many assignments and works produced in school were useful exercises that equipped me with the necessary knowledge to make work, but although they prompted me to think about what I wish to accomplish, I never really got this time to reflect until after I graduated. In a way, U of T prompted me to ask critical questions about visual representation. Once I was thrown back out into the world, I had to confront all of these considerations and re-examine where I want to situate myself as an artist.

PP: Growing up, you lived in a couple different places when did your family first move to Canada? What other places did you guys live at before coming to Canada?

SZ: I immigrated to Maryland, Baltimore at the age of 3. We moved once or twice in the city before I went back to Beijing for grade one. Then I bounced between there and Suzhou (where my mother’s family is from) for a year or two until we returned to Baltimore, and then moved to Windsor. For a while in my early adolescent years, my mother and father lived Detroit while I stayed in Windsor with my grandma. We also occasionally moved back to China over summers. After high school, I moved to Toronto and have stayed here since.

PP: What kind of a kid where you growing up? Do you think your identity changed as you moved from place to place? Were you easily adaptable to new changes and place you moved to?

SZ: I was a very outgoing child in the beginning. My mother told me I use to go up to strangers in restaurants and ask to sing a song for them. After I moved, I became much shyer after having to adapt, but eventually got more comfortable. It’s a wonderful thing that children can get along so easily at times, though navigating the world of adults was much harder. I remember we use to live on the border of two small neighborhoods where there was a park in between. A woman once came up to me and my mom and told her that the park was for the residents of her neighborhood, the richer neighborhood. I don’t know that I am easily adaptable – it is more of a choice between adapting or getting left behind. I think starting out my Western experience in Baltimore made me quickly aware of my class and identity because it would be suddenly cited and sometimes used against me. I spent a lot of my early years in Canada and the US trying to better assimilate and move away from my Chinese heritage. In my more recent life, I am retracing my steps, relearning histories, customs, and traditions as a means to re-familiarize myself with what I lost and forgot. In my work, I am also interested in exploring the social and personal factors, which led to this type of self-erasure.

"...we [Canada] really aren’t the US’s morally superior neighbours. Flint [Michigan] has no water, neither do the majority of the Indigenous communities in Canada..."

PP: Do you have any siblings? How were your parents like with you growing up?

SZ: I have a younger sister. She is 12 years younger than the first and me in our family linage to be born outside of China. This age gap has made it so that we never fight and get along well. I love my sister and can’t wait to take her out for her first drink. My mom, sister and I all share the same zodiac sign of the sheep. I like this harmonious image of us.

My parents and I had to navigate many cultural differences and disagreements as I was growing up though they never stopped being supportive and loving. While they were definitely concerned about me venturing into the arts, I am very fortunate to have Chinese parents who encouraged me to pursue my interests. After attending the 89 protests and seeing the horrors that were committed by the government, my father decided that our family needed to move. By then, they had already established a life for themselves in Beijing. Moving to the US meant working many unstable jobs, going to school again, learning a new language and navigating a new country, all the while raising me. I think that going through this process with my family made us immensely close because we were all we had.

PP: What are some of your earliest creative memories?

SZ: When I was in third grade, we were learning cursive by repeatedly rewriting words along dotted lines. I remember writing my name over and over again in cursive until the last line, where I drew flowers along my name. When I got this worksheet back, the teacher had marked “very creative”, “very pretty” or something along those lines, though I failed the worksheet and had to do it over again.

Still drawing flowers but barely using cursive nowadays.

PP: Can you remember an early memory of feeling embarrassed about something?

SZ: Somehow when I was learning English, I had mixed up the words volcano and astronaut in my mind. I started going around to people saying that I wanted to be a volcano when I grew up, and even made a song and drawings about it. I don’t remember when I was finally corrected, but it still makes me a bit red to think about how enthusiastically I went around telling folks I wanted to be a magma flowing rupture in the Earth.

[Laughs]

PP: When was the first time you felt really smart? what was the situation ?

SZ: Although I wasn’t doing so great in math when I was in China, when I moved back to the US, I excelled from the bits of knowledge I picked up. Math was probably my best subject, until I got to High school and stopped taking it.

Lala 2016, Wallpaper, Dimensions variable; Installation view

Lala, 2016 (Detail)

PP: You've a couple works that have been presented as wallpapers. When did you start seeing wallpapers as way of thinking through your ideas ?

SZ: I slowly got more and more bored with the white cube as a backdrop for my 2D works and the perception that the gallery space is neutral. I became interested in how patterns and images can reclaim and transform the dynamics of a space and imbue it with a new history and narrative. How artists like Dominique Pétrin and Haegue Yang Merge their 2D works with bright wall works encouraged me to extend beyond the frame. I am also interested in how wallpaper is often associated with domesticity and how the medium of wallpaper can be used to bring the domestic and private into the contemporary public sphere.

PP: Can you talk about your Big Money, Big Luck series...its visually interesting with combinations of images and objects. Where did that series surface from?

SZ: Big Money Big Luck is a play on the idiom 大吉大利, which is a statement that is sometimes used to bestow fortune and good energy at holidays or special events. Created around the new lunar year, I wanted to design a wallpaper filled with as many markers of visual prosperity and luck as possible, while also adding some information about the symbolism behind these objects.. My favorite design from this series is the yellow pattern with the gold ingots and dumplings. Ingots (or yuanbaos) were a form of currency used in imperial China and dumplings are considered to be lucky because they resemble ingots in their shape. The design with lettuce and money references the word play that associates the object with luck.

Big Money, Big Luck (大吉大利), 2016, Wallpaper

cài(菜, the word for vegetable) and cái (财/ fortune) sound very similar to one another, hense the connection.

In Chinese culture, there is a lot of superstition and symbolism around luck. Sometimes to the point where it influences major decisions. I wanted to create a wallpaper work where this prosperity is hyper-saturated, loud, and brimming with good fortune. I am now also exploring a less graphic method of approach through the tradition of papercutting.

PP: What would you say surprises you about yourself?

SZ: I can function quite successfully with 6 or less hours of sleep on a regular basis, though this streak hits a breaking point and then I crash hard.

PP: Did you find yourself making work that you felt weren’t coming from an earnest place in order to satisfy a certain standard or where you putting up work in spaces just for the sake of finding exposure? Is that what you meant by “pay your dues”?

SZ: It was not necessary the work I was making that I was unsatisfied with but instead that I would negotiate and second-guess myself and my work very frequently in order to get that potential show onto my CV. I came across exhibitions where the artwork was not handled with care, the show had a contrived and vague premise, and of course many instances where I was not paid, and sometimes asked to pay.

I think when you start, you encounter many examples where the gallery/ organizer/ curator treats you as if they are doing you a courtesy rather than going into it as a collaboration and partnership. I just saw a show for emerging artists where the artists were asked to submit a fee to be considered, then the exhibition poster focuses on prestige of the jury members who selected the works rather than list the artists in the show.

I’ve found that my most gratifying experiences with galleries/ projects were the ones where I was able to work with organizers who were also artists in some capacity. I wonder if this is because of a shared ‘we get it’ understanding.

PP: What’s the art scene like in Toronto in terms of emerging arts and spaces for exhibiting early stage emerging artists? It seems like from your C.V. you’ve had a lot of exhibitions in the relatively small amount of time you’ve been out of school…and this year you had a solo as well.

SZ: The art scene in Toronto is fairly small and I think the biggest challenge for emerging artists is continuing to make-work and continuing to find time to develop a practice. Toronto has some wonderful artist-run centres, galleries and communities who are incredibly dedicated and invested in the emerging scene so we are very fortunate in that sense.

A Visual History of MSG Marketing from the Accent Series, 2016 – ongoing Chromogenic Print 11 x 14”

PP: I’m really liking the images coming out of the Accent series so far, when did you start doing research this project? Where did this initial interest for it come from? Where would you like to see it go?

SZ: I started Accent about a year ago after my partner found a shaker of gorgeously labeled MSG in a convenience store. I had never seen anything like it. The only instances before then where I had seen the words MSG were usually accompanied with ‘No’ at Chinese restaurants. It was a rather old shaker and store which made it clear that this was a relic of the past. I became wrapped in finding out more about MSG as a material and as a dietary substance, and why it came to be so antagonized today. What I found was a lot of information about the misinformation surrounding MSG. Chefs, academics and food historians have recently begun advocating for it and trying to demystify it. Then I started collecting can after can of MSG. I was searching heavily into antique and collectable forums from all over the world in order to acquire as many as I could to build a linage of how MSG was presented. After I had photographed about 50-60 packages of MSG, I had to stop. I then looked more locally to see how MSG was first received in Toronto through archival materials. This will turn into an artist’s bookwork with recipes that call for MSG from the Toronto Star that I am hoping to publish next year.

The overall Accent project will be exhibited at Y+ Contemporary next year and I’m very excited to have it unveiled in Scarborough, where there are many Chinese food establishments. I’m hoping that the show and program alongside it will generate conversations around food, culture, appropriation, and foodie culture.

I also have high hopes that I can take this project to New York someday. The treatment of MSG that I have seen from the NY times is very different from that of the Toronto Star. I think it can bring up some interesting parallels on how different the lived experiences of Chinese Canadian immigrants were from that of Chinese American immigrants.

PP: What’s one annoying thing about contemporary art right now?

SZ: The completely white painting trend.

PP: Given unlimited resources, where would like to see your work and your creative career go?

SZ: I would like to see my work go outside of galleries and reach public spaces. I’d really like to create more work focused around collecting. I would stay in school, the archives and the studio forever. I don’t know if I’d like to stay in Canada or try elsewhere. I would absolutely love a studio in Beijing. I would like to make work my grandparents can connect with.

PP: Who is a new creative you are currently excited about?

SZ: I’m in love with Annette Lemieux and Sarah Charlesworth’s talented use of minimal imagery, though they’re kind of old school from the Pictures generation. More recently, I am completely infatuated with Amanda Ross-Ho’s works. Her seductive yet quirky and sterile use of objects is giving me life right now. There’s a Wu Tsang work I really need to see where she explores the life and writings of Qiu Jin, an early Chinese feminist revolutionary. Wu Tsang and her collaborator Boychild explore the queer narratives behind Qiu Jin’s life and work. Lastly, locally, I’ve been finding Tings Chak’s work and writings to be very powerful though I think I am coming across them a bit late in the game. She has an amazing ability to relay the politics of absence in spaces.

Photo by Alice Xue