VOL2: 淹山成島 Drowning Moutain, Rising Island

Springing from Jessie Gong’s work of indigo dye that maps the topography of 千岛湖

Thousand-island Lake onto fabric, this poem works toward a parallel mapping of that onto

language, concretised on page/screen as well as to be realised in a different dimension of

motion and discourse via performance.

The concept of the performance looks at the linkage of water and land – the seeming

distance yet intimate diachronic connection beneath.

My poetics is to trace the topographic schema to the origins of Chinese characters, letting

the inbuilt iconicity and meaning-making pronounce themselves while enriching them by an

intention of defamiliarisation that is embedding another language, English, along the

strokes. The hybrid layer of this poem is a play of and with language, exploring the internal

tension between and challenging schematic capacities.

The poem is multimodal in style, in line with my current poetic practice. It takes in static

concreteness as well as a dynamic narrative oriented by the sequence of the character

strokes that will come to life in this performance.