Film
The Creative Approach One Filmmaker Is Taking to Depict the Hong Kong Protests
Experimental director Simon Liu's shorts seek "a new lexicon of approaches" to the city.
Matt Turner
Film
Using AI to Question What Art Is
Lawrence Lek's AIDOL tells the story of an AI composer making music in a world rendered in video game graphics.
Film
North Korea as a Multifaceted State Instead of a Boogeyman
Filmmaker Soon-mi Yoo is getting her own focus at the London Korean Film Festival. Her 2014 documentary Songs from the North takes a neutral approach toward a nation that is usually reviled or laughed at.
Performance
Cauleen Smith Projects a Futuristic Black Utopia
Smith's Black Utopia LP forms an Afro-futurist collage of sound and language, rhapsodizing on the utopian possibilities of Black space travel and astrology.
Books
A Philosopher's Journey to the Real
In Journey to the Land of the Real we get a glimpse of the utter foreignness that Victor Segalen experienced in China over a century ago.
Books
A Dystopian Fairy Tale Reflects Challenges of the Present
Despite the serious environmental and political challenges presented in The Emissary, Yoko Tawada suggests that another path exists.
Books
An Enigmatic Literary Icon of Modern China
Although Lu Xun eventually cast his lot with the communist revolutionaries, he took a dim view of literature that attempted to recover a national identity or culture.
Books
The Past and Future of China's Socialist Literature
The story Nicolai Volland tells will surprise those who believe communist China was closed to the world, and anyone who thinks communist literature is dull or irrelevant.
Books
A Poem of Shame: In the Words of China’s Workers
Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry, edited by Qin Xiaoyu and translated by Eleanor Goodman, collects work by Xu Lizhi and 30 other worker poets.
Books
Poems About Everything: Bénédicte Vilgrain’s A Tibetan Grammar
Whatever her own commitments to the Tibetan language or Buddhism, Bénédicte Vilgrain utilizes their historical and philosophical aspects on behalf of her own work, and on behalf of poetry writ large.
Books
Etel Adnan: Philosophy at Night
Lebanese-American artist, philosopher, and poet Etel Adnan’s recent publication, Night, is in equal measure a series of meditations on intersubjectivity and spirituality, and a dialogue between prose poetry and short verse.
Books
Cosmic Wind: Yoshimasu Gozo’s 'Alice Iris Red Horse'
In 2003 I received an invitation to attend a reading by the poet Yoshimasu Gozo, someone I had never heard of. I asked around, and was told that Gozo was an avant-garde poet who read in a bygone oracular style.