Converging the Verbal and the Visual in Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Abstract

Contemporary Chinese poetry demonstrates a tendency towards converging word and image. Many authors use this convergence of visual and verbal as a means of renewing their poetics. It reflects not only orientation towards a creative dialogue with the art of previous periods, but also emergence of new expressive means that implicate language experiments (incl. words as asemantic images). Examples of this approach include formal experiments of poet-cum-artist Yan Li, calligraphic explorations of Ouyang Jianghe, and works of several poetry groups and circles, among others — the ‘marvelous enlightenment’ calligraphy school (miao wu). This use of hybrid formats for information presentation captures new ways of visual-verbal interaction in rethinking of the literati tradition. At the same time, it constitutes a part of our need for surviving in a global text field, where misunderstanding of the text language in constant crossing of linguistic borders is increasingly becoming an important part of our practice.