Category Archives: Yan Li

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Short poems for contemporary world

Reading new short poems by Yan Li, now, and thinking that they are indeed an excellent (won’t say “best”) literary medium for a visually-oriented, multi-media barraged contemporary mind-space.

And with that thought, the recollection that short poems are anything but contemporary. There are of course the “short poems” 短歌 ， a genre of Japanese poetry even more condensed than the globally well known haiku. And even in the modern period, the last century, during the ebbs and flows of modernism. Yagi Juichi’s 八木重吉 (1898-1927) poem from early in the twentieth century:

If you lay a plain koto
in this brightness
it will begin playing quietly,
unable to endure autumn’s beauty.
(from ‘A Plain Koto’)
 

Regardless of when or where, the condensation increases the pressure of attention, so that every syllable (even material of the words themselves) come into focus. The experimental of these have been frequent occurrence as well. Taiwan poet Xia Yu’s 夏宇 “Reading” 閱讀, for example:

舌頭上
一隻蟹
On the tongue’s tip
A crab

Yan Li has been composing what he calls ‘poetry gum’ since the early 1990s, and has by this time amassed literally thousands of such short poems. They serve multiple purposes, but for the most part I would say they are occasions to change perspective. As the poetry gum series is alternatively titled: ‘polyhedral mirror’ (otherwise known as a ‘disco ball’) refracting images in ways that we don’t expect, can’t see coming, but are lucid in certain light. Here I offer a few with one of my favorite Yan Li paintings, “Mother and Child”

 
 
无论你是什么样的炸药
语言都能够充当导火线
No matter what kind of explosive you are
Language can serve as the fuse
 
 
理想所搭建的积木之城
在人与人的互动中倒塌出来的形状
就是我们如今生活在其中的城市
A city of wooden blocks is erected by our ideals\
Through give and take they tumble into a certain shape
And this is the metropolis we live in
 
 
人类有打动自己的能力
人类不可能做得比人类更坏
人类是制造科学的一种工具而已
人类必须发出些声音地
从人类的身旁走过去
Humanity is capable of touching itself deeply
Humanity cannot do any worse than humanity
Humanity is just a tool for manufacturing science
Humanity can’t help making sounds
As it walks on past humanity
 
 
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“A Beijing Bohemian in the East Village”–Ai Weiwei still in New York, sort of

This week saw the opening of an exhibition of Ai’s photographs. The exhibition is on view at Asia Society called “Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983-1993,” but also through Ai’s Google+ account. The latter would suggest that Ai is not entirely ‘disconnected’ from the world at large.

I happy to find that Holland Cotter’s review in the New York Times is beginning to demonstrate a more subtle understanding of Ai and his work, something I feel has been more or less absent the English-language reporting on him (the same can be said of a great deal of Chinese ‘reporting,’ of course, only subtlety assailed from a completely different direction).  The list of epithets, gadfly, artist-provacteur, adviser, suggests better appreciation of the many roles Ai has played over the years.

What isn’t mentioned is the nude series that I’ve mentioned before on this blog.  This might be because his notable nude photograph emerges later on.  But this work, of Ai and poet artist Yan Li, is from the era covered in the exhibition:

It may well be that that the New York exhibit includes them, but that Cotter does not consider this series of nude photographs worthy of mention. And indeed, they perhaps wouldn’t be were they not the basis for one part of the charge against Ai (pornography) and an ongoing element in his work.

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The Self Portrait

These days I’m back to work on an article concerning the poetry and visual art of Lo Ching (Luo Qing 羅青) with a special focus on self-portraiture in his verbal and visual work.  This has me considering self-portraits of a number of artists I’m often writing about, and self portraiture in general.

There are of course some notable instances of self portraiture in the Chinese visual art tradition.  Most spectacularly, perhaps, those of Ren Xiong 任熊,

More recently, but still early in the modern period, Li Jinfa 李金发 and Ji Xian 纪弦 both worked in genre.  Here is Li’s “self-sketch on a Rome Night” from 1925:

And one of many self portraits done by Ji Xian (this one 1934), who used the medium as a kind of punctuation for the various pauses and sometimes full-stops of his long career:

More recently, Yan Li 严力 created a few self portraits shortly after taking up painting in the late 1970s. This one is from 1982:

 

Coming to the contemporary era, the “self” shows itself to be a fully flexible concept, bound and also rent from identity in various ways, as suggested in the series by Cang Xin 苍鑫.

So what of Zhong Biao’s self portrait? He does not, as far as I know, much take himself as central focus of any painting.  His abstract work, though, can be seen as a self-portrait of such, a depiction of the mind’s interior, the “psychological fishbowl,” so to speak.  But even in the partially abstract, as in the image “Climax” from 2009, I think an argument can be made for self-same representation, particularly with Zhong’s deft use of the frame:

What, of course, transparent bowl shows us is an open question.

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Wang Qiang (Mai Cheng) or, Two Poetic Nights in Dalian

I met the poet Mai Cheng 麦城 (pen name of Wang Qiang 王强, left, pictured here with Yan Li 严力) a number of years back in Seattle, which is to say totally out of his element.  I met him again two weeks ago, this time in Dalian, his very own city.  By ‘his very own’ I mean that the man seems to own the city, and not only because he is a wealthy real estate developer,  wealthy enough in fact that he doesn’t bother to develop much anymore.  I say “owns” because his command of his environment, via the highly understimated medium of the language of poetry, is near complete.  Wang Qiang is, in other words, a successful contemporary Chinese business man who also happens also to be Mai Cheng, one of the best poets of his generation.

Take, for instance, “After a Dream Passes Over”

A dream paved my way to the city
A glimpse provided by a surge
From an out-of-date battery
Showed a different view of my native ground
The silence on the left side of the road
Persuaded the silence on the right
By order of the street light
A Glass elevator
Slowly lifted my social standing
And the marriage that fell in line behind it
Was bottled by pop songs from Taiwan
With their imported melodies
As Theresa Teng’s singing style
Moved from outer to inner regions
There I was, sitting at the most reflective part
Of a transparent screen
Watching mannerisms of wealth enter and leave
My gaze was hijacked
By lurid signs winking through glass
But behind that gaze
Was yet another gaze
A teenager’s red mini-skirt
Scorched by toughness under her skin
Opens a split at the seam
The bartender measures precisely
Two densities of liquor in a glass
A woman pours liquor for a man
His spinning head leaps toward her recesses
In places where nightfall lies in heaps
New darkness embraces old darkness
Spurred by the dream, I try on a new status
Leather shoes, neckties, trench coat
Like a turned-off lamp
Turned on once again
I hurry after another lamp’s light
At a crossing the signal light
Brings my dream to a halt
Along with the self that rambled in dreams
Now night-blue air stretches before me
I try to use it, to elevate the night to higher quality
Then, over the canyon of discarded experience
To make the leap
To go or not to go?
After the dream passes over
(translation is by Denis Mair and appears in Selected Poems: Mai Cheng [London: Shearsman Books, 2008], pp 57-59)

Sight is the operative sense in the work, appropriately for the city, particularly at night.  Mai Cheng is seeing–mini skirts and skin, liquor glasses, glass elevators, and street lamps. But he is also seen, in new clothes, in an orderly marriage, in reflections.  While occupying a rather difficult space of both agent and object of gaze, he can also be found listening carefully, to pop songs, and to the commanding sound of silence that both frames his native ground, again street level, and opens it up as a “night-blue air” that remarkably “stretches” before him.  This unbroken transition from the concrete to the abstract, a rising to higher quality over “discarded experience” seems so familiar, so apt, even for the reader who is none of the things Mai Cheng is.

There is no question that the “value” of Mai Cheng’s voice can be in part attributed to his financial success, a fact which pervades a contemporary Chinese society reduced too often to crass calculations and cost-benefit analysis.  In such a context, if it doesn’t sell, it doesn’t matter.  And poetry doesn’t sell.  On the other and I believe equally important hand, the successful business wo/man in contemporary China is increasingly in need of poetry, and all that poetry symbolizes.  The question, I suppose, is when that need for poetry becomes more acute (such that poetry might in fact jus sell), will there be anyone there to write it?  At the moment, fortunately, Wang Qiang is on the scene.   Let’s hope he lasts.

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Nobel Prize

Blog composed 11.13.10. 1

To set the record straight:

The New York Times, on November 11, runs an editorial by KISHORE MAHBUBANI on Liu Xiaobo that voices succinctly and cogently another opinion.  This reaffirms (in my mind at least) the function of the NYT as platform for dissemination of information about topics relating to contemporary China, particularly where politics are concerned.

Not that I would concur entirely with this particular view either, and critics Mahbubani’s view are abundant.

Ed Friedman, in a post to a Chinese-culture related list-serve, makes the following observations:

This is an old and long-discredited tune. The song is not about Deng’s

achievements or Bush’s crimes. The lyrics are: China will naturally evolve

into a democracy. Therefore anyone who tries to promote democracy stirs up the authoritarians and thereby delays democracy. As a result, the true

friends of democracy tomorrow are the enemies of democracy today.

(By the way, it is a fact that many parents in spring 1989 tried to talk

their children into leaving Tiananmen, saying that it was best to wait for

the old guard to die off and a new generation to rise. The old guard has

died off. China is not becoming more open, however.)

In reality, no government ever evolved into a democracy. None. Ever.

Authoritarians do not voluntarily abandon the political stage. Power does

not give way without a struggle.

It is, however, interesting to find Mahbubani arguing as if democracy were

a universal human good. I cannot remember him ever before doing that. Is

this a change of heart or a rhetorical tactic?

Ed Friedman

Nonetheless, Mahbubani articulates the possibility that awarding the Nobel Prize to Liu is counterproductive in terms of advancing democracy in China.  The reason, if not already obvious enough, is that governments (like the people that comprise them?) are less inclined to substantive change if not compelled by outside pressure. Again, it seems a comparison is in order: when has “international pressure” had any impact on particularly domestic politics in the United States?

Hopefully, but not likely, a final observation on the issue.  This is not the first time the Nobel Prize would rankle presiding governments, or even just the Chinese government (Dalai Lama).  Although it is perhaps noteworthy that in a case like Nelson Mandela (1993), would be jointly awarded with F. Willem de Klerk, making the award a recognition of some actual peace among conflicting forces rather than the potential for peace.  In Liu’s case, it would be useful if his intercourse with the Chinese government could result in something other than imprisonment and silence.

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“Written Words Make a Wall” video–Yan Li’s painting and poetry

One more in my video series, this one with cameo by Lucia, an avid if still somewhat imperfect reader.

The short poem series that frames, textually, the video is ongoing.  Numbering already in the thousands, Yan Li regularly groups and publishes these works in English and Chinese (English versions usually courtesy of Denis Mair, Yan Li’s most consistent translator).  I hope to continue producing video work based on the poems and his paintings, both old and new.

文字是一块墙