Table to Farm, 2022. Mixed media on hand-painted cotton map mounted to foam board. Installed at 41 Ross in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Documentation of mapping process by YY Zhu. Photographs of map by the artist.
Table to Farm was a community-made map of food supply chains in San Francisco’s Chinatown, made over the course of two afternoons in July 2022. In order to make Table to Farm, I created a lightweight fabric map of Chinatown to mount onto a mobile foam board, which our mapping team and I could easily draw on or gesture to. Our mapping team consisted of YY Zhu and Stephan Xie from the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, Xiaoxiao Bao, and myself, with Anny Cheng as our video documentarian. The five of us walked around Chinatown, interviewing the owners of local food businesses — from restaurants to cafes and boba shops — about where they sourced their ingredients. We were amazed to learn that many of the restaurants in Chinatown buy a significant quantity of their produce from local grocers, and through the act of mapping these local supply chains, found ourselves documenting the movements of a self-sustaining neighborhood food ecosystem. We followed up on our interviews by asking the grocers where they source their produce, eventually tracing a network of food pathways from Chinatown table to California farm.
We are grateful to all of the Chinatown business owners who shared their stories with us and helped us to create a portrait of this vibrant, self-sustaining neighborhood food ecosystem.