that matter, the poet himself. While many other writers’ works are
quite deeply bound up with specific histories of the admittedly tumul-
tuous decades of late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century
China, Yan’s work stands somehow outside this frame of reference.
Yan’s portability stems at least in part from the commodity-like
quality of his work, one that adheres in its method—especially the
“poetry gum” series—and content to a widely recognizable world
image. Yan’s urban scenes, in other words, deny the specific gravity of
their geographical and historical location in much the way that a
widely recognizable name brands do, for the purpose of immediate
and effortless application locally.
This is not to say, of course, that Yan Li’s paintings and poems
necessarily “sell well,” just that in their presentation they borrow
mechanisms that relate to economic exchange and that in their content
often refer to dynamics of this exchange, even if the agents in the
transactions are inanimate or something other than human. Yan Li’s
focus, thus, is on the systems themselves, and this focus has put him
thematically and methodologically current in ways that many of his
contemporaries are not. Moreover, his work—visually and poetically—
is not so much trying to beat the ever-widening global system, of
which he is undoubtedly critical, but to get to the bottom of it. In
order to do so he orients himself to an increasingly rapid and efficient
global flow, disengaging in numerous possible subject positions to
explore others sometimes midstream. Getting to the bottom of it is the
ultimate challenge, though, in the global context, as the emptying out
of content occurs just at the point of traction, where Yan Li meets his
readers or those looking at his paintings. When successful, then, Yan’s
work is a satisfying return of substance to what seems increasingly
interconnected points of nothingness. Yet, even if we as readers are able
to find him there, we can bet we would not be staying for very long.Notes
- The alternative rendering of “menglong” is “Misty,” a term that does not
well reflect the controversy that the poetry generated on its appearance,
nor, for that matter, the ponderous nature of the style itself. I will
henceforth use the term “Obscure” to designate this poetry.
2.Todaybegan as a handwritten and crudely mimeographed journal that had
widespread impact in the late 1970s and early 1980s in China. - Another and more recent example would be the Crisis and Detour: 25 Years
of Todayconference that was held at Notre Dame University in March
2006.
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