Louise Zhang: Celestial Tapestry.: Farfield City Museum & Gallery

All around us, there exists a constellation of small kindnesses and comforts, easily overlooked. There are the green buds pushing their way through the loam, into existence. A banana tree planted in an Aussie yard, its cocooned fruit tucked between its hanging leaves. A watermelon that's been split up for a family to share. The cook sorting through the fresh produce at the local market gardens, testing ripeness, ready to feed to the local masses - or the neighbours, co-workers, relatives and friends, urging you take these extra cucumbers they bought, or gifting the strawberries they grew themselves.

Our stories can be traced in produce, mundanely nurtured and eaten: the flow of my memories is punctuated by bags full of winter melons, begrudgingly ferried to my aunties and teacherson orders of my parents, or trips to the Western Sydney Parklands, where my father shopped, before planting little rows in our garden with the same methods he used in China. In Celestial Tapestry, the latest exhibition from Louise Zhang, these humble building blocks are brought to the fore. The space is a sanctum of sorts, a shrine to earth and sun: a shimmering curtain divides the centre, representing the sky that bestows life, while Zhang's paintings - painted in the artist's characteristic and vivid and dreamlike colours - show glimpses of an unfolding sunrise, swathes of sun-dappled grass, ripe persimmons and thickets of morning glory.

"When we think of immigration and migrants, diaspora, family, there are always stories of survival, and that survival gets kind of passed down generationally," Zhang tells me. "But the way I see it in this sense...it's a different kind of survival. It's a survivalism that's turned into a beautiful thing."

Of particular interest to the artist are the nucleuses of community produce, which have shaped the Australian landscape and cross-cultural interactions: market gardens. Spearheaded by Chinese, Italian and Vietnamese migrants, these co-operative farms have provided local communities with fresh food for centuries. The chief priorities for the farmers were sending money back home to their families overseas, feeding the people close to them and, perhaps, gaining a sense of personal agency in a new land. Scholar Sucheng Chan mentions that, as early as 1863, an observer in Victoria remarked that there was "scarcely a town but is now well supplied with all kinds of household vegetables by these celestial gardeners." Across Australia, these gardens - many of which are heritage listed - are still thriving today.

"My studio is in Rockdale and were a five-minute drive from the Kyeemagh Market Gardens... and it's in this middle of all these houses and near an airport and it's just kind of this random piece of land," Zhang tells me. "These places have so much history...I just love the way it's shaped our landscape in the sense that they're still supplying produce to restaurants and Asian supermarkets. And those are the type of produce that are sought out by my mum, my aunties who do the cooking. Things that remind them of home, things that they connect to culturally."

The hard work of growing produce, utilitarian on its face, also acts as a bridge, connecting us to the environ-ment, to our histories, to everyday acts of sharing and connection. Zhang recalls her parents' friendly Greek neighbours, and admiring their home-grown basil; she also mentions the proprietor of Jerky House in Cabramatta, Lyn, whose family runs a dragonfruit farm in Melbourne. She gifted Zhang "the fattest dragon fruit ever... [it] was the most delicious dragon fruit, I've legitimately ever tasted." A row of spring onions sits at the foot of the show's sky-curtain, a ubiquitous vegetable that is stubbornly grown on windowsills and in cramped spaces even when one doesn't have access to a garden. "My parents work in a textiles factory filled with aunties who are always like, 'Here, I've grown this ginormous winter melon," Zhang says. "I don't even have contact with these aunties as much. They just know my mum and I'm their kid. So they say, bring some for your kid. It's really, really sweet."

These acts of community and kinship are embedded into Zhang's paintings, her style reflecting her cultural roots in Qidu, Wenzhou, an island where community plots are the norm. The rows and rows of daikons that Zhang associates with idu, particularly when spied from an airplane window, is reflected in her striking geometric shapes - vast rectangles and peephole circles that act as inviting windows into the wonderland of lush vegetation. This collage-like style is rooted in the moon gates and latticework found in Chinese gardens: "Their positioning is done on purpose because the idea is that when you look through, say, a moon gate, you're not viewing it as just an entry or an exit point. It's framed to frame the landscape, so you view the landscape as a painting, or as an important piece of work."

"A lot of the market gardens that we have here, even the ones that are heritage listed, they don't have money and so it's quite rundown...the ones that have the history, like the one near me, there's no money to repair things. They still have workers who are my mum's age, picking by hand," Zhang elaborates. In many ways, the show's small pockets of beauty are a rebuff to the prevailing attitude that unpolished land was an eyesore that should be further developed: "I wanted to place a context. Going back to the Chinese gardens and how things were framed through the moon gates and the windows as works of art, I wanted to frame produce in that same lens as how we view a beautiful garden to look like. I think I wanted to treat it like the Golden Emperor would," Zhang laughs.

Zhang's subjects are presented against a flattened plane, characteristic of traditional Chinese scrolls. Told in university that her paintings needed 'more dynamic' Zhang's playful and intentional experimentation with form, which densely layers pockets of storytelling and explosive colour, challenge this notion that the flat plane has a fixed and traditional meaning. This fluidity is also reflected in the symbolicimagery, with gongshi (scholar rocks), peaches, ginger, mandarins and lotuses scattered throughout. These mythological referents to healing and auspiciousness also connect to Zhang's personal narrative: the mandarins, for instance, symbolise good luck due to their resemblance to golden ingots, but are also specifically the bitter ougan mandarins grown in Wenzhou. "One of the reasons I was inspired to do the mandarin is my grandma," Zhang says. "She gifts a bunch of it, from her beloved tree, but now she's older, she can't climb the ladder. So, it's something I wanted to paint for her."

The act of gardening is also an act of hope - hope that what you're holding in your hands will live, that it will help you heal and grow, that it can be shared. Zhang's fragmentary aesthetic seems to evoke this delicate process, and the piecemeal yet profound understanding of culture that many second-gen migrants feel: "It's making your own narrative in that way," Zhang says.

We live in times of uncertainty, within a devastated climate, where the simple act of growing food is harder each passing day. Our settler history too, is a violent one, where ongoing colonisation has ravaged lands that have supported human life for tens and thousands of years. Against these knotted histories, the vibrant produce and verdant greenery spied through Zhang's windows feel especially profound - like precious glimpses of healing.

"One of the things I do love is that, cross-culturally, there are stories of praying for good harvest and giving offering for good harvest. And I wonder if those traditions ever have been passed down to the humble backyard of a migrant," Zhang ponders. Ultimately, the impetus behind Celestial Tapestry is as simple as the bags of produce I still carry every weekend, passed over to new hands in a warm, mundane moment: "This is my way of giving someone a really good melon," Zhang laughs.