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Reviews

Stone Turtle

Mai Mang's bilingual collection, translated by the author himself, is an important contribution to the still small corpus of contemporary Chinese poetry accessible to readers of English. It is also a useful introduction to a poet of some stature, one who emerged shortly after the Obscure Poetry movement (or Misty Poetry movement) had opened the floodgates to unmitigated personal expression in the late 1970s.

If we've grown accustomed to reading American poetry, we come to Mai Mang expecting strangeness. As in all fine poetry, it's there in plenty. Yet at least half of these are American poems, made, as American poems have always been, out of bafflement in a land as wide as China's, more vacant, and even, oddly, more late. Whether he datelines his reports Beijing or Changde or Los Angeles, the poet stands at a formal distance from the world and speaks intimately of and to it: "O arrogant love." His eye has made a turtle of a stone; his tenacious, quizzical voice addresses it in fellowship: "How have you / Managed not to confuse yourself entirely / With the other rocks around." A poet of dreams and cities, like Eliot, Mai Mang brings back news that turns out to be from all our own places.

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Eaten Your Fill of Rice?

I read your catalog and looked at the photographs long and hard. I think that the work was carefully conceived, with a strong conceptual impulse. The photographs are all the richer for having read the text. What variety in the essays.


In an intelligent and discerning manner, Chee Wang Ng transcends literal time and place with his melding of traditional Chinese culture and avant-garde, modernist aesthetics. Ancient subjects and objects are presented via contemporaneous formats characterized by formal restraint serving to enhance richly sensuous visual as well as delectable tactile appeals.


Chee Wang Ng's signature bowls of rice, whether presented in glossy, richly colored photography reminiscent of Dutch still lifes with a Chinese flavor or as an installation of real bowls he has collected over the years, are food for thought - and ravishing food for the eyes.


With a wide embrace, including eggshell porcelain from China and low-fire ware from Morocco, this exhibition is a fun, informative, indexical romp through the fascinating world of rice bowls.


Chee Wang Ng constructs images that are metaphors in an over-arching discourse on identity, culture and modern experience. He uses light and form to transform space into narratives of complex dualities: physically and spiritually, presence and absence, familiarity and forgiveness.