MCLC: Ekphrastic Assimilations: Finding Poetry in Art

[MCLC LIST]

MCLC LIST
Ekphrastic Assimilations: Finding Poetry in Art
PROGRAM
October 28, Pacific Lutheran University (Philips Center Room 201)
Panel Session 1 (11:00-1:00)
Ekphrastic Assimilations: Introductory Remarks
Paul Manfredi (Project Director), Pacific Lutheran University
The Ekphrastic Assimilations conference is a two-day event examining recent but also long-unfolding relationship between writing, particularly in poetic format, and Chinese visual art. Collectively, themes to be addressed include reception of Chinese contemporary art in global environment, formal dimensions of visual and verbal texts including concrete poetry and abstract expressionism, and word-image innovation in light of established word-image traditions of calligraphy and other genres connected with literati (文人) culture. In the process we will interrogate familiar critical categories such as "dissident," "experimental" or "avant-garde" art in order to both delineate limitations of their previous iterations as well as explore ways in which literary or word-oriented analysis might change their function in critical understanding. We will also visit image-based poetics as practiced outside of China, in the work of Arthur Sze, Denis Mair, and others. The main focus of discussion, though, will be Chinese and sinophone writers such Yan Li严力，Xu Bing 徐冰, Lo Ch'ing 羅青, Ai Weiwei 艾未未, Hsia Yu 夏宇, Ouwaiou 欧外鸥, Xu Demin 许德民 and Chen Li 陳黎, among others.
World Writing: Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground and Hsia Yü’s Pink Noise
Brian Reed, University of Washington, Seattle
One recurrent dream of the avant-garde has been to transcend linguistic divisions and create a universal means of communication. How, though, would one ever achieve such an end? After recounting a paradigmatic (and failed) attempt—Velimir Khlebnikov’s advocacy of a zaumnyj jazyk, a “transrational language” in the 1910s and 1920s—this talk compares two contemporary examples, Xu Bing’s search for a “universal script” in Book from the Ground (2003-2014) and Hsia Yü’s computer-assisted translations in Pink Noise (2007). Xu Bing strives for perfect clarity; Hsia Yü delights in chaos and misrecognition; both paths represent attempts to think about the material specificity of Chinese writing—its look and its history—in the context of China’s emergence as a self-consciously global political power and its increasing participation in international circuits of cultural and economic exchange.
Arthur Sze and the Ethical Image
Rick Barot, Pacific Lutheran University
In contemporary American poetry, Arthur Sze has a particular reputation for his deployment of the image.  Many of his poems have a signatory technique: they gather and juxtapose images with brilliant abandon, often with very little, or virtually none, of the rhetorical glue that might give coherence to the surfeit of imagery in his work.  Taken individually, Sze's images have a powerful concreteness; in aggregate, they generate emotional and philosophical propositions about time and contingency, people and what we call "nature," science and culture, the body and knowledge.  Sze's use of the image is an ethics, one that proposes a sprawlingly connected, non-hierarchical world, and it explores the complexities of the touch-points between the human and the non-human.
Panel Session 2 (3:00-5:00)
Ekphrastic Practice of Today, A Chinese View
Zhang Er /张耳, The Evergreen State College
Many poets have used ekphrastic approach in their writing practice since Homer's time. The examination of a few past work directly linked to the practice leads to the question what this approach offers specifically in comparison with stimulants or references from other sources.  Is there traceable parallel between the forms of the image with the forms of the resulting poem?  How is the practice integrated in a contemporary poet’s working process and how does it change as a poet matures? Does Chinese poets’ practice differ from poets writing in other languages? Do poets who also create visual art write differently or paint differently? This presentation will explore these questions. Among the contemporary poets' work we will examine include that of Yan Li, Lu De-an and Guang Guang and some of my own work.
Conceptual Artistry and Iconic Treatments in Yan Li’s Paintings
Denis Mair, Zhongkun Cultural Fund, Beijing
In this presentation I will talk about Yan Li's use of iconic images in his paintings. An icon straddles the borderline between representation and sign. It is a pared-down rendering of something or someone which is conventionally associated with a certain idea-cluster or valuation. Icons are used in advertising and information access because their recognizable surface points to deeper layers of assumed content. Yan Li's handling of icons and thematic images is done in the mode of a conceptual artist. Why do I say this? First, he makes his own icons and conventionalizes them according to his own strategy. Second, the idea-clusters which he packs into his icons tend to be exploratory and open-ended.
Take for example his use of bricks in his "Brick Series". Bricks can be taken as visual shorthand for the impact which the construction boom has had on people's lives. (Of course this is only one track of interpretation.) In Yan Li 's paintings, bricks are shown encroaching into contexts where one would not normally see them. This suggests that the impact of commercial and residencial land development has been expanding into segments of life where it was not found before. Yan Li then proceeds to problematize his own icon and use it to trigger a dance of associations. For instance, he depicts a skyline crowded with huge lighter-than-air balloons which are paradoxically made of bricks. Within a single image, lightness of intention is bound up with heaviness of material embodiment. The space opened up by this juxtaposition belongs to the affective space of conceptual art. I believe that Yan Li 's talent as a poet allows him to devise and explore such spaces in especially poignant ways. In my presentation I will discuss other conceptual moves by Yan Li. If time permits I will draw a distinction between his personalized iconography and the use of anime-like human figures in works by other artists such as Li Jikai.   
Poetic Convention and Visual Conceptualization: “Naming A Site” in Qiu Zhijie’s World Garden (2016)
Zaixin Hong, University of Puget Sound
Ekphrasis, according to the Poetry Foundation, is “description” in Greek -- “An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the ‘action’ of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.” A poetic convention, ekphrastic assimilation at once internalizes and externalizes a process of visual conceptualization in the history of world art, from Ancient Greece, medieval China, to 21st century art world. In this study, we will explore the word-image duality that embodies ekphrasis as seen in Qiu Zhijie’s World Garden mural for BAM/PFA (2016) by focusing on “the privilege of naming a site” associated with the Wheel & River Estate of Tang poet-painter Wang Wei (699-761) and the Ten Scenes of West Lake in Hangzhou since the Southern Song China (1127-1279). The significance of such a multicultural World Garden lies, we argue, not only in Qiu’s satirical observation on the existing division between East and West, but also in his extraordinary revelation of the “action” of a sumi mural at UC Berkeley. It is this multifaceted action, which includes poetic conventions, visual topology, cultural assimilation, commercial popularity, localization and globalization, and above all, naming practice bilingually (in both Chinese and English) out of a calligrapher’s hand from the Epigraphic School, that forever challenges “the privilege of naming a site” of this or any other time.
October 29, Seattle Asian Art Museum (Conference Room) 
Panel Session 3 (11:00-1:00)
Viewer as Performer: A Cognitive Journey from Xu Bing’s Tianshu to Dishu
Kuiyi Shen, University of California, San Diego
A consistent thread in the work of Xu Bing is the artist’s unexpected challenge to and manipulation of the viewer’s perception. On its surface, this ambush often seems like an enjoyable practical joke, but behind the humor are profound questions about the workings of our minds, and how effectively we as individuals can actually control our mental habits. Much of Xu Bing’s work sets up a scenario in which the literate person’s ability to read or write is hijacked in unpredictable ways. In New English Calligraphy, for example, the artist presents the audience with scrolls of brush-written square words, constructions in ink that can have no other purpose than to be read. Yet, to approach this traditional form, the calligraphy scroll, in the customary way, that is, to read the text, requires the viewer to decrypt a newly invented written language. He has never told his viewers what to think, but by involving us as participants when he leads well-established tracks of human communication off course, he asks us to wonder how do we think?
Artifactualizing Chinese English
Jonathan Stalling, University of Oklahoma
This presentation examines the work of Xu Bing and Gu Wenda and address the artificualizing strategies of both artists tracing the arc of what Stalling calls their paleo-orientalism within the uneven global circuitry of Sinographic imaginaries (exploring how such works operate within various logics across the Sinophone/Europhone audiences). Stalling will then counterpose his latest Chinese-English works (English Mirror Rimes (英韵镜, and Pinying 拼英/SinoEnglish) as an intervention in the economies and scales of linguistically constituted conceptual art via dominant modes of artifactualizing "Chinese-Englishes" for a global marketplaces. The talk will include a variety of artworks including interactive technologies including but not limited to the app version of the work can be downloaded for free now at www.pinyingapp.com.cn.
Contortions of the Word, Contortions of Ink: Ekphrasis and Expression in the Post-Representational World of Xiao Kaiyu
Christopher Lupke, University of Alberta
Much of the poetry of Xiao Kaiyu defies simple interpretation and insertion into a cohesive narrative. His poetry often consists of the juxtaposition of jarring images, the use of catachresis, willful use of language outside its customary context, and twisted syntax to push the conventions of reading beyond the expected norms. Xiao also has a strong interest in avant-garde Chinese art, has curated several shows, and has written several essays in contemporary art in China, particularly in Shanghai. This presentation examines some of his poems in conjunction with the art that he has collected and curated, contemplating how the composition of his poetry might find an echo or a resonance in the art that he prizes the most. 
Panel Session 4 (3:00-5:00)
Chinese Concrete Poetry: Traditions and Innovations
Michelle Yeh, University of California at Davis
Concrete poetry emerged in the 1950s in Europe and Latin America and achieved wide popularity in the 1960s. To this day, it has continued to be commonly employed by poets around the world. As the Poets.org website says: “In essence, works of concrete poetry are as much pieces of visual art made with words as they are poems.” The picture--literally and figuratively--becomes more complicated when we look at Chinese poetry composed of ideograms, which, by definition, is a pictorial representation of an idea or thing. This paper offers a survey of concrete poetry in the history of modern Chinese poetry from the early twentieth century to the present. It highlights examples that demonstrate both the universal features of concrete poetry and the unique qualities of the Chinese language from Ouwaiou 鷗外鷗 (1911-1995) to Chen Li 陳黎 (b. 1954). In doing so, it shows how Chinese contributes to the definition and redefinition of concrete poetry.
Abstractness and Concreteness: Visual and Verbal
yAnG xiaObiN， Academia Sinica, Taiwan
How do we define the concept "abstract" in visual art? In fact, the material quality (such as the oil paint) in abstract painting is always seminal in sensual reception. Likewise, if there is "abstract photography," the material objects that construct the abstract visual effect (if not images) are also not to be ignored. My discussion will start from the relationship between the abstract effect and its material basis. In poetry, however, the concrete materials (words, for example) are usually treated as parts for the sake of the whole grammatical construct. But what if we take the words/characters as independent materials as such and develop their abstract potentials? If there is a type of poetry that might be labeled "abstract poetry," can the concrete, meaning-isolated words be detached from the grammatical whole and display their effects, just like the colorful, formational materials in abstract visual art? What is the relationship between the effects of the fragmentary or assembled words/characters and the loss or chaos of meaning due to the lack of grammar?
On Floating Wor(l)ds: Deconstructing the Reception of Contemporary Art from the People’s Republic of China in Anglophone Contexts
Paul Gladston, University of Nottingham
The reception of contemporary art from the People’s Republic of China in Anglophone contexts is conspicuously contested. While some contemporary art from the PRC has been received positively as a locus of critical dissent (oppositional and deconstructive) from established governmental authority, other commentators have dismissed that art as severely lacking both in formal innovation and critical relevance. The principal focus for the former is the artist Ai Weiwei, who is now consistently upheld, especially in the mainstream media, as an exemplary dissident. In the case of the latter absence of in-depth analysis is in part telling.
This paper will deconstructively analyse the reception of contemporary art from the PRC in Anglophone contexts, drawing attention not only to the inevitable contradictions and inconsistences of that reception, but also its lack of granular attention to the particularity of localized discursive and material circumstances within China. Revealed are significant slippages between what are often highly abstract readings of contemporary art from the PRC — whether positive or dismissive — and the rather more complex, critically undecidable, standing of that art in the context of China’s autochthonous artworld, including in relation to re-motivational translations of terms such as avant-garde/qianwei and contemporaneity/dangdaixing between Anglophone and Chinese cultural contexts. In conclusion, there will be discussion of the deleterious effects of the Anglophone reception of contemporary art from the PRC, not only on an attentive critical understanding of the latter, but in addition searching analysis of the inherent contradictions and limits of internationally dominant western(ized) critical discourses.
Concluding Remarks
Paul Manfredi
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 18, 2016
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