Time Traveling Chinese Cowboys of Vis Valley

Winter 2024

Berkeley Art Center is proud to present Time Traveling Cowboys of Vis Valley, a linocut print by Jasmine Liang, a BAC member and volunteer. See this new work behind the BAC front desk, and pick up a booklet to read a statement from the artist.

“ 舊金山(Old Gold Mountain), the word I grew up using for San Francisco, comes from the Gold Rush Era. Our name for San Francisco has been continually mythologized by generations of Chinese immigrants that have desired to settle in San Francisco, including my parents. A large empty lot, a former lock factory now turned brownfield site in development, extends for a mile from my neighborhood of Visitacion Valley to San Bruno Mountain. I imagine this lot as the last frontier of San Francisco and the site that Chinese cowboys time travel to. From Hunters Point to Leland, San Bruno Avenue to Chinatown, I always feel that wherever I go I carry that history of where Chinese American settlers have lived and built communities in the past and the present. Chinese cowboys also follow these routes. There are two railroads in the background-on one side is the Bayshore Caltrain stop that I grew up by and the other is the Transcontinental Railroad. Chinese cowboys traverse between these two parallel times, from my present day to the 1860s when Chinese laborers worked on the Transcontinental Railroad that connected the East and West coasts of the US.”

- Jasmine Liang