For two weeks in July, the conceptual artist Alexander Si’s (@alexandersi) replica of a Sweetgreen salad restaurant in Manhattan’s Chinatown agitated just about everyone. It was so realistic that some visitors got mad when they learned there were no salads to be had. It also instigated a community-wide text thread where area residents considered protesting what they mistook for the arrival of a gentrifying chain restaurant in their neighborhood. Si, who was raised in China and is now based in New York, painstakingly hand-crafted the installation, titled “Sweet Green,” at the the gallery Chinatown Soup after spending hours sitting in different Sweetgreens and studying their environments. After moving to Toronto in high school, Si regularly braved the 12-hour Greyhound bus ride to the Big Apple, where, alone in the city, he often found himself at Sweetgreen. “It all is biographical,” he said. “The more I blend in here, the deeper I go into my own immigration process in this country, the more I reflect upon social topics.” Click the link in our bio to read more from Vittoria Benzine on #ArtnetNews. __ Photos by Oren-Andrew Wentzel, courtesy of the artist.