Connie Zheng: Cinematic Harvest - Food + Film Pairing

41 Ross Artist-in-Residence Connie Zheng presents Cinematic Harvests, a three-part screening series that will pair independent films centering food, restaurants and farming with small themed dishes that respond to each evening's film program!

Selected films range from documentaries to experimental shorts and emphasize familial relationships, ritual and labor, and movements through history, memory, fantasy and myth. Themes of love, tactility, and elastic time thread through the works as they transport viewers to home kitchens, ghostly restaurants and dreamy fields. Each screening will be roughly 40 to 60 minutes long and include films supported by Canyon Cinema, the Kadist Foundation and the Center for Asian American Media, including a screening of the Emmy-nominated film Bloodline and a Q&A with the filmmakers.

Azucena Losana, Tigre del Carbón (2022) - 5 min

Mark Street, Winterwheat (1989) - 8 min

Naomi Uman, Leche (1998) - 30 min

Jodie Mack, Wasteland No. 3: Moons, Sons (2021) - 5 min

Emily Chao, chive pockets (2017) - 3 min

Total runtime: 51 min

All shot on Super 8 or 16mm film, the luminous films in this evening's program feature artists in the Canyon Cinema collection and use food, plants and farming as focal points to map a constellation of movement through time, memory, love, and both the personal and the abstract. Hand-processed visual poems of flowering planets, shimmering orange and plum trees, and hands cupping wheat. A lyrical portrait of a family of ranchers in rural Mexico and their community. A grandmother makes chive pockets for the last time.

Wingyee Wu and Lap-See Lam, Mother's Tongue (2018) - 18 min

Thảo Nguyên Phan, Tropical Siesta (2017) - 14 min

Alicia Smith, Teomama (2018) - 5 min

Moe Satt, Hands Around in Yangon (2012) - 7 min

Ana Vaz, Ha Terra! (2016) - 13 min

Total runtime: 57 min

Ancestors, ghosts and spirit companions thread through the experimental films and video works in this evening's program, drawn from the Kadist Collection. This selection of moving-image works emphasize ritual, relationship to place, and speculative journeys through memory, history and myth. Restaurants, fields, markets, and lakes are key locations throughout these films for considering relationships between body, labor, land and place. Join us for ghostly journeys through Chinese restaurants in Stockholm, make-believe games played by children in an agricultural commune in Vietnam, and poetic on-screen performances of mythical origin stories.

James Q. Chan and Santhosh Daniel, Bloodline (2021) - 30 min

We are thrilled to co-present a special screening of the Emmy-nominated film Bloodline, which explores Chef Tu David Phu's genesis as a chef and traces his culinary journey through the lens of family, diaspora, and food. Rooted in Chef Tu's personal reflections and narrative, Bloodline takes viewers through his parents' experiences in the Vietnam War and Khmer Rouge, his upbringing in West Oakland, ascent to fame as a contestant on Top Chef Season 15, and his return home. More than a family history, Bloodline is also an investigation of what mainstream U.S. culture and the culinary establishment choose to value or throw away, whether they are certain life experiences or the parts of a fish. Co-director James Q. Chan and Chef Tu David Phu will join for a filmmaker Q&A afterward. Co-presented with the Center for Asian American Media (CAAM).

All screenings and food will be free to the public to join. Vegetarian options will be offered throughout our screening events. Stay tuned on our social media @41.ross for more details about each screening!

The Artist-in-Residence program nurtures emerging Asian artists to develop and expand on community-based art practices located in SF’s Chinatown while cultivating an exchange platform to critically engage within the Chinatown community. Headquartered at 41 Ross, this program contributes to Chinatown’s vitality and supports the social and economic recovery of the neighborhood.

Follow the journey of Connie Zheng’s residency at 41 Ross, behind-the-scenes, and more: @41.ross.

The event will be hybrid outdoor/indoor - masks are required at all times in indoor spaces unless consuming food and refreshments.

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and filmmaker based out of xučyun / Oakland, California. Projects such as large-scale maps, speculative seed exchanges, seed-making workshops, and experimental films are strategies for navigating diasporic memory, the continued weight of history and the possibilities for collective imagining amidst ongoing and future ecological transformations. Her work pays particular attention to participatory scenarios and speculative fictions involving interactions between landscapes, humans and more-than-human worlds. Zheng has exhibited work nationally and internationally, through venues such as the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Asian Art Museum, Singapore Art Week, and the IMPAKT Festival in the Netherlands. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Minnesota Street Project Foundation, among others, and was the inaugural recipient of the Joint Space Award. She recently published a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, and her work is held in the collections of the Kadist Foundation and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. She graduated with BAs in Economics and English from Brown University, an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California — Berkeley, and is currently a PhD student in Visual Studies at the University of California — Santa Cruz.

@cccsanfrancisco | cccsf.us

Chinese Culture Center (CCC) is a non-profit arts organization established in 1965. CCC elevates underserved communities and gives voice to equality through education and contemporary art. Rooted in San Francisco’s Chinatown, CCC is a loud and creative voice to uplift social and economical transformation. We provide a safe environment for artists who champion activism, resiliency, and healthy communities. In doing so, we shift dominant narratives, empower change, and reimagine our futures.

@41.ross | 41ross.org

41 Ross is a unique community art space located in the historic Ross Alley in San Francisco Chinatown. As a partnership between the Chinese Culture Center and the Chinatown Community Development Center, it represents an experimental collaboration between a contemporary art center and a neighborhood development organization.

Since 2014, 41 Ross brings together those who live, work, and play in Chinatown through community-based art and culture programming that promotes dialogue, appreciation, and creative engagement around the cultures practiced by the everyday people of Chinatown. Past projects include; Keyword School (2014), Chinatown Pretty (2015), Chinatown Home Cooking (2016), Liminal Space (2017), and Art, Culture and Belonging in Chinatown and Manilatown (2020-21).

41 Ross Community Art Space & the Artist-in-Residence Project are supported by:

San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development

Community Challenge Grant

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

41 Ross, 41 Ross Alley, San Francisco, United States