~ Nationality: Taiwan ~

午與夜的十四行 / A Sonnet of Noon and Night by 綠蒂 Lui Di

On 2 June, 2022 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems, Videopoems
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Taiwanese performance artist Yin-Sheng Liu aka Craphone Liu directed and composed the music for this poetry film with its beautiful, calligraphic fonts. Not being fluent in Chinese, I wasn’t able to find anything meaningful about the author in a web search.

more than one by Lo Sirong

On 16 April, 2022 by Marie Craven with 0 Comments - Videopoems
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A musical videopoem from Taiwan, ‘more than one‘ features the exquisite voice of Lo Sirong singing her own text, in a first collaboration with film-maker Amang Hung, also a poet of some renown.

The subtitles in English are by Steve Bradbury, an American who lived for many years in Taiwan as Associate Professor of English at National Central University. In this week focusing on translation at Moving Poems, this video also embodies another level of poetry translation – into song. About Lo Sirong:

Influenced by her father the poet Lo Lang, Lo Sirong enters her musical world through her poetry; she applies an improvisational style that highlights both her vocal and literary talents to produce intimate meditations on love, family and the human spirit in everyday life.

Lo has produced a large body of work and has written hundreds of songs in Hakka Hokkien and Mandarin Chinese. She has won a number of awards for both her songwriting and poetry from major publications in Taiwan. – World Music Central

Further reading about Lo Sirong also reveals that she embarked on her singing career unusually late in life, not long before turning 50.

Prior to sharing this collaboration between Lo Sirong and Amang Hung, Moving Poems published two musical videopoetry collaborations between Lo Sirong and film-maker Ye Mimi.

White Clouds by Lo Lang

On 24 July, 2020 by Marie Craven with 0 Comments - Musical settings, Videopoems
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White Clouds is a musical poetry video that was filmed, directed and edited by the outstanding Taiwanese film-maker and poet, Ye Mimi, who released it to the web just two weeks ago. The story of the film…

This song is an adaptation of the poem “White Clouds” by Taiwanese poet Lo Lang (1927-2015). The recording was made by Lo’s daughter Sirong, a renowned, award-winning singer-songwriter in Taiwan. When Lo Lang wrote the poem in 1950, he was expressing his deep desire for freedom. At that time, many Taiwanese were suffering from extreme violence and political repression at the hands of the ruling Kuomingtang, which took over Taiwan after losing the Chinese Civil War to the Chinese Communists. This recording, made in 2018, marks a watershed moment for Lo Sirong and her now deceased father, as Taiwan flourishes today as a fully democratic society.

Lo Sirong sings White Clouds in the Hakka language. She has a marvellous voice, deeply expressive of her father’s poetry. The music overall is wonderful to hear. The English subtitles bring the welcome experience of the poem in written translation as well.

Ye Mimi’s earlier videopoems include I See Green and Golden Shadows as part of the Wild Whispers global videopoetry project, initiated by Chaucer Cameron in the UK. Dave shared three of Ye Mimi’s videos from earlier years here at Moving Poems, including from her own poems. One of these videos was also published by Cordite Poetry Review from Australia, where she wrote an interesting account of her relation to videopoetry.

Ye Mimi’s bio at Vimeo:

Ye Mimi is a Taiwanese poet and filmmaker. A graduate of the MFA Creative Writing Department at Dong Hwa University and the MFA Film Department at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she is the author of three volumes of poetry and has internationally exhibited several of her poetry films. Through collaging her words and images, she improvises a new landscape trying to erase the border between poetry and image making. Book-length translations of her work are available in Dutch and English.

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Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk by Yin Ni

On 22 October, 2015 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Musical settings, Videopoems
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A new poetry film from the Taiwanese filmmaker Ye Mimi is always an event. This one features a musical adaptation of a poem by Yin Ni from singer-songwriter Lo Sirong, performed with Gomoteu. The English translation in subtitles is by David Chen. Here’s the Vimeo description:

This experimental music video is based on a poem that both satirizes and celebrates local culture in Taiwan. “Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk,” the title of both the song and the poem, is a play on the Buddhist phrase “Hail the Bodhisattva Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy.” The poem refers to local junk vendors, who repeatedly call out “sell them to me” as they walk from neighborhood to neighborhood looking for unwanted household items, typically scrap metal, tools and electronics.

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*List of screenings:

2015
The Kuala Lumpur Experimental Film and Video Festival, Malaysia
7th Cairo Video Festival, Egypt
Experimenta–8th International Festival of Moving Image Art in India, Bangalore

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A poem by Yin Ni
Music by Lo Sirong
Performed by Lo Sirong and Gomoteu
Filmed and edited by Ye Mimi

In North America and Western Europe, we tend to think of street poetry as this gritty, youth-driven, hyper-competitive and aggressive thing, but in most parts of the world, the streets and markets are wellsprings of a much more diverse and mature oral culture, and I think this filmpoem captures that brilliantly. Hail the Bodhisattva of Collected Junk offers a unique glimpse into popular Buddhism and Taiwanese vernacular culture, and manages to seem simultaneously light-hearted and profound in a manner reminiscent of Erasmus or Rabelais.

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被移動的嗎？/ Was Being Moved? by Ye Mimi

On 9 May, 2014 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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This author-made videopoem by the Taiwanese poet and filmmaker Ye Mimi was recently featured at Cordite. Her comments there about her creative process are especially interesting:

I was first introduced to the term ‘poetry film’ at the Zebra Poetry Film Festival in Taipei. As a poet, I knew right away that was the kind of video work I would like to do. In 2007, I went to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago to study filmmaking and to continue experimenting with the relationship between poetry and film. To me, making a poetry film is like weaving. It doesn’t prevent me from being a poet. Instead, my poems grow with my films simultaneously. I always write something first before I go out to collect images, but everything is still unclear and improvised when I am shooting. During the editing stage, I like to collage the images. Afterwards, I always write something based on the images and then collage the images more. In other words, my images and text feed each other rather than feed on each other.

She goes on to talk about the specific ways this process played out here, and about the Taiwanese Daoist pilgrimage shownd in the film — do go read it. She concludes:

If someone asks me what my creative process looks like, I would say, ‘It’s like directing a group of electric jellyfish sneaking into a tilt tower to rub together. They could become a sunny day, a fever, a humming song, or a glass of Bloody Mary, which … I never know.’

They Are There But I Am Not by Ye Mimi

On 19 November, 2009 by Dave Bonta with 0 Comments - Author-made videopoems
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A riveting videopoem by Ye Mimi, poet and filmmaker from Taiwan, who says,

We experience a lot of poems as a record of real life. Through the specific Taiwanese backdrop, the poetry film illustrates a series of moments to approach the concept of time, which is not as concrete as we are taught. As a poet, the filmmaker presents her ideas on the nature of reality, existence, what is there and what is not there.

The acting credits include God, the poet’s grandma, and many others. According to one online bio, Ye has an MFA in filmmaking (from the Art Institute of Chicago) as well as an MFA in writing.