oppositional relationship between the human and natural that
fundamentally unravels in the contemplation of concepts born in his
work. The end result seems a kind of negation; Yan’s tendency is to
draw pictures in word and image that steal from the world of ideas
and run with the money.
The refusal to submit to positionality, to render himself subject to
an explicit point of view, is one facet of Yan’s location in the global
city. His work goes with the flow, almost celebrating environmental
degradation in the same breath that laments it. Yan’s faceless brick-
heads, which to begin with eschew ethnicity of any kind, also resist
their own humanity. This maneuver would, in the hands of another
artist, perhaps, lead to a critique of an automaton phenomenon. In
Yan Li’s case, though, something more subtle is at work. We observe
instead a genuine mixture of impulses, one that emerges from an
appreciation of human nature as system itself, a system that is con-
tiguous with otherwise alienating forces—whether they be political,
environmental, or technological. In all of these cases there is a sense of
mutual dependency, one that is characteristic of the contemporary
global city—be it in terms of commerce, or mutual reliance on natural
resource exchange. Awareness of these often dubious partnerships
deflate activism at the very moment it might be conceived.Poetry and Painting: Koans of the City
Yan’s connection to a global city is from the above examples partly a
content or thematic connection—his images are almost entirely of
urban landscapes, or refugees from it. The themes of Yan’s poetry
indeed include considerable amount of urban reference, many of
which I will discuss below. More at issue, however, is Yan’s methodol-
ogy. By the early 1990s, Yan was experimenting with what he often
calls his “poetry gum” series, a collection of short poems that, in the
principal Chinese edition, is titled “Spinning Polyhedral Mirror”
>面境ABC.^12 These epigrammatic condensations of contemporary
experience are, at first glance, a matter of convenience. One can find,
for instance, hundreds of such poems online on a variety of Web sites.
One can also discover a continuum in the relationship between the
“poetry gum” poems and Yan’s longer works, where clearly the poet
selects particularly successful lines as candidates for the short-form
expression or explores elaboration of some shorter poems in expanded
format.^13 Beyond these matters of convenience, however, there are
further implications of Yan’s “poetry gum” method. As he explains inYan Li in the Global City 1531539781403976079ts10.qxp:Layout 1 11/9/07 11:10 AM Page 153