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.
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