New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

And fix up a few hours of war for fun €理‚ƒ„時的戰‡ˆw‰遣

Tomorrow {天

While smuggling peace to other planets 我向其Œ:球'Žx時

I’ll not be taking U.S. Dollars 收‘Y

But as suggested above in the case of his environmentally conscious

paintings, Yan does not merely give in to this mode of the dissident,

the reformer, the artist/individual versus government oppression, or

even environmental degradation. His revelations demonstrate a

“subtracted” poetics, one that reduces to the essence, driving at the

commonality, indeed, the universal in human experience, but one that

is also divested of the kind of interest that would lead to explicit points

of view or positionality of almost any kind. The koan analogy allows

us to find something that distinguishes Yan’s sticks of gum from

aphorism or, worse yet, from political or commodity advertisement,

namely, the types of communication that Yan’s poetics undermines.

If we picture such a figure, as Yan does in his work, we might derive

the following image:

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