Tag Archives: Luo Qing

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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:

image002

image006

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Luo Qing’s Rewrite

Visual artist poet and scholar Lo Ching (Luo Qing) has been now and again inclined to rework famous pieces of the Chinese tradition. In most cases, the “rework” has to do with visual interpretations of the literary tradition, itself much overlapping with visual. In some cases, though, Lo also rewrites the poems, taking one jueju 絕句 line at a time as the basis for his own new poetic line. In the following poem, the very well known “Deer Hermitage” 鹿 柴  by Wang Wei, Lo takes the final image of sunlight penetrating a deep forest and illuminating moss, and militarizes it. Wang Wei’s poem is in bold, and Lo’s lines follow beneath.

空山不見人
　　　　 (Empty mountain, no one seen)

因為我是原始太初
　　　 Because I am the very first

第一個
　　　　                  Primeval animal

自覺為人的
　　　　         To become suddenly aware of my

獸

                                            Humanity

但聞人語響
　　　　 (But human voices are heard)

因為我是大千世界
　　　　 Because I am the last person

最後一個
　　　　                  In the whole wide world still able

還能獸語的
　　　　              To speak

人

                                                Animal talk

返景入深林
　　　　 (Reflected light enters deep forest)

因為世上最後一線
　　　　 Because the very last thread of the world

爆炸光閃
　　　　                  Explodes in a flash

射穿我空洞肋骨的
　　　　 Penetrating deeply

深處                                            My bones and flesh

復照青苔上
　　　　 (Again shinning on green moss)

因為整個黑暗的地球上
　    Because what remains of the dark world

只剩下一小塊彈片
　　　　 Is but a bit of shrapnel, shimmering

在一層薄薄的青苔中
　　　Upon the thinnest layer

明滅                                            Of moss

Among the many versions of visual performance of the opening lines of this poem (empty mountain, no one seen), the one below is my favorites:

I like this image in particular for the way that the word for person (人) appears in the word for mountain (山) –where, in terms of the characters themselves it does strictly “belong”– is a bit lost even so, drifting about the bottom of the word, slightly off kilter. The two characters at the right, in fact, have come apart from themselves more or less entirely, with the center of emptiness falling down on to the mountain, leaving two watery dots above.

In terms of self-referentiality, a feature notably most out of sync with the Chinese literary-art tradition, there is the obvious presence of Lo’s ink stamp, again not where it “should be,” appearing in the center of the painting. This bold demonstration of self is deftly mitigated, however, by the even more central location of the word NO () that separates the two characters of Luo Qing’s name, becoming something like “Lo NO Qing,” or “Qing NO Lo,” or simple graphic (non-sequential) demonstration of negation.

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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.