From far away, one sees a typical-looking map of the celebrated Golden State. But, zoom in closer, and you’ll witness a story unfold through the carefully layered strokes of paint. Artist and experimental filmmaker Connie Zheng’s works tell stories that a standard map cannot track. They reveal a topography not bound by freeway lines or county borders but by the deeper contours of history and culture.

Zheng’s path to becoming an artist was far from straightforward. Growing up as an immigrant in the United States, Zheng faced expectations from her family that steered her toward financial stability over creativity. But despite her family’s reservations, her passion for art continued to persist.

“My parents were pretty poor when we first came to the States, and they really wanted me to go into something practical,” Zheng said. “I’ve been making art since I was really young — drawing on the walls of my grandparents’ apartment or in my aunt’s notebooks when she was in college. But I didn’t really allow myself to take the idea of being an artist seriously.”

It wasn’t until her mid-twenties, after studying economics and English in college with the intent of pursuing journalism, that Zheng considered art as a career option for the first time. She applied to the Master of Fine Arts program at UC Berkeley on a whim, and she credits her experience there for opening up her artistic perspective. At the program, she experimented with different media and discovered a love for video as a means of storytelling. This experimentation helped her see the potential in blending narratives with visual exploration.

Now, as the artist-in-residence at Harker, Zheng finds herself on a reflective journey. Her installment, titled “Mapping Our Way Home”, is a multi-layered exploration of place and identity centered around maps that tell stories of California’s complex history. These paintings line the Rothschild Performing Arts Center hallway, inviting students and visitors to engage with geography in fresh ways. 

“Everyone knows how to interact with a map,” Zheng said. “You can approach one of the maps that I make without much specialized knowledge about art. They are a way of de-familiarizing ourselves with places that we have come to take for granted that we feel like are very familiar, whether that’s the state of California or the Bay Area.”

For Zheng, maps represent more than just geographical tools. Her first map, titled “Routes/Roots,” traced the global journey of over a hundred food plants, uncovering historical connections that tied oranges, rice and watermelon to migration and cultural exchanges. In “How to Make a Golden State”, she charts the labor of Asian farmworkers who played a crucial role in shaping California’s agricultural infrastructure, a story rarely represented in mainstream history curriculums.

“I started that map when I first learned that a lot of the farmland in the Sacramento Delta area was actually irrigated by Chinese farm workers,” Zheng said. “When I learned that I was like, ‘how much of the agricultural infrastructure and landscape in California was shaped by Asian Americans’? That was the central guiding question. Each map is a repository of all the things that I’ve learned in response to the central question.”

As Zheng dove deeper into this process, she found herself spending months on research alone, allowing each map to become an index of both personal and archival memory. Each piece is a slow build-up of details and layers. By the end, it becomes not just a visual, but an entire narrative.

Zheng introduced an interactive component for Harker students through her social sculpture project. During workshops, students shape symbolic clay seeds, each representing something they want to preserve, hope for or protect. She asks all her students “if [they] could have any seeds with [them] at the end of this world or the beginning of a new one, what would they be?” Some students create seeds for abstract ideas like “infinite knowledge,” while others choose more personal symbols, like a seed representing a family member. 

“It’s really an exercise in hope,” Zheng said. “These seeds are about imagining what we want to see in the world as weird or silly as they are. It’s playful, but it’s also a way of engaging with serious questions. What do we care about? What do we want to preserve or grow?”

Even as her work receives recognition and is featured at exhibitions like GROW at the Palo Alto Art Center, Zheng admits that the path of an artist can be challenging. However, she has found a way to stay grounded by following her own instincts and interests despite her projects diverging from conventional expectations. 

“It can get really easy to feel like you should be doing something differently,” Zheng said. “Maybe you’re not making what’s trendy at the moment, or you see your friends making different kinds of artwork and you’re wondering, am I doing something wrong? It’s really about just constantly trusting yourself.”