Visiting Lo Ch’ing (羅青)

 

Recently visiting with poet-artist Lo Ch’ing in his Shanghai studio where he kindly gave me one of his paintings (“manyuan” 满园), a full garden, on occasion of the publication of my book.

LoChingManYuan1 LoChingManYuan2

Lo was just back from attending events in conjunction his “In Conversation with the Masters” exhibition at Masterpiece in London. Below are remarks on his work by Michael Goedhuis:

 

<p><a href=”http://vimeo.com/95917539″>Lo Ch’ing at Michael Goedhuis</a> from <a href=”http://vimeo.com/gallerylog”>GalleryLOG</a&gt; on <a href=”http://vimeo.com”>Vimeo</a&gt;.</p>

 

 

 

Michael Goedhuis short video on exhibition in New York

Lo Ch’ing (Luo Qing)’s work was part of exhibition on display for just one week! in New York. The conclusion was December 16, this post is behind schedule. Fortunately, and a bit more long term, we have Mr. Goedhuis’s comments via this video.

I’m particularly struck by two things. First, the rather hard distinction between the oil painters of the “past 20 years” who’s deliberate exploitation of political themes is not, at long last, cause for celebration, and the observation that these ink painters (Lo Ch’ing among them) are, in Goedhuis’s words, “the quintessential [Chinese] expressers of our time”. Word!

Below in not so perfect reproduction a few of Lo’s quintessential images in question:

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the concrete poem

Back to work on poetry again after what seems a long foray into art-only (+ politics, I guess) topics.  Of late, current writing concerns self-portraits in word and image, with an ancillary focus on the concrete poem.  The latter is inspired by the work of Luo Qing 羅青 , a poet-painter from Taiwan who has also done extensive research on modern Chinese poetry and Chinese culture. In the course of exploring Luo’s work I was further introduced the the following 1965 “Self-Portrait” by Chinese concrete poetry pioneer Zhan Bing 詹冰(綠血球 Taipei: 笠, 1965)


The image-poem is composed of three Chinese characters.  The top xing 星 or star, the bottom hua 花 or flower, and the center lei 淚 or tear.  The reading being something along the lines of : the revolution of the natural life cycle, from the universe-level life of stars to the locally observed course of single flowers, brings about a sadness in the lyrical subject, the “unchanging” center of ongoing impermanence.

Apart from what can be said about this intriguing work, I post it here only to complain about a strikingly contrasting reprint I’ve recently discovered.  The new version appears in Zhan’s collected works (Taipei: Guoli Taiwan Wenxueguan, 2008) as such:

The difference between the two versions of this “same” poem is extraordinary.  Whether or not the poet himself was involved in the selection of font or page layout is unknown to me (though I will endeavor to find out).  Still, the former and presumably original version strikes me as more “accurate” in the graphic sense, which is to say that the look of the Chinese fonts, with the much larger and calligraphically arrayed “tear” is more intimate, vulnerable, and affective than the colder and far more angular reprint.  There is also too much space surrounding the single tear.  It could perhaps be argued that the second version reinforces the loneliness of human existence (space) and the remote nature of a relentlessly cyclical Nature (including emotional states such cycles give rise to), but I find these concepts already well-enough expressed in the first version.

Nonetheless, this concrete poem is a good case for meditation on the relationship between word-image-meaning.  That some editor (or even the poet) thought this was the same poem strikes me as in and of itself worthy of note.