Chinatown/ محله چینی‌ها

Solo Exhibition 2026 Oakland, California Photos by Zabrina Deng For years, while sitting at our dining table at ARTogether, I watched elderly neighbors of Oakland’s Chinatown pass our gallery with their shopping carts, carrying daily groceries. A simple reminder of life and nourishment. You would never leave an immigrant home hungry. In this installation, three shopping carts, each composed around a single color, transform a familiar neighborhood object into a portrait of the community that has surrounded and sustained ARTogether for years. The cart, an object of labor and necessity, becomes a vessel, holding not just groceries but the accumulated weight of a life built in a new place. Beyond my homage to Chinatown, the work celebrates the dignity of daily life and the quiet acts of nourishment, labor, and persistence through which immigrants make a place their own. It is an object of survival that becomes an object of belonging.