#week 149

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This is week 149, folks!

I am looking for authors or new stories to read. If you know an author or story that I’m not reading, please let me know!

Readers-please make sure you show these authors some love! If you’d like to check out my previous posts, follow #rachel’s fanfic lists or search the tag on my blog. Happy reading!

Until Human Voices Wake Us - lesbianophelia aka @mendontprotectyou

Katniss Everdeen is Not a Stalker - AULOVE aka @mega-aulover

You Were The One (i treated the worst) - lesbianophelia aka @mendontprotectyou

A Bump On The Head - @mtk4fun

Geometry - @dandeliononfire

The Contractor - @butrfac14

Finding The Right One - @louezem

A Question Addressed to Liu Shijiu (問劉十九) by Bai Juyi (白居易). Tang Dynasty. Translated by Burton Watson. 

Bai Juyi (772-846) was a poet and a government official of the Tang Dynasty. His poems were often inspired by his daily life, and unlike that of other poets from his time, Bai’s writing style is regarded as simple and highly readable. 

A Question Addressed to Liu Shijiu is an invitation; Bai is asking a friend to drink a cup of wine together on the snowy evening, sharing not only the wine but also their time and thoughts with one another.

Queen of Temple Street (廟街皇后) dir. Lawrence Ah Mon (劉國昌). 1990.

Lawrence Ah Mon is a South-African born, Hong Kong based actor and filmmaker. Nominated for Best Director in the Hong Kong Film Awards twice, Ah Mon’s works are known for a specific focus on the problems of the poor. Much of their work also contends with Hong Kong’s colonial and post-colonial status, attempting to dig into postcolonial subaltern history in particular.

Queen of Temple Street describes the relationship between brothel matron Hua and her daughter Yan, who follows in her mother’s footsteps. In Ah Mon’s exploration of the Hong Kong sex trade, they create an incisive and perceptive imagination of what familial bonds entail in a place where traditional conceptions fail.

“Occidentalism” by Sally Wen Mao. From Oculus. 2019. 

A Kundiman fellow and Asian American studies instructor at Hunter College, Sally Wen Mao is a renowned Chinese American poet with work appearing in multiple collections and anthologies. Mao has authored two books, Mad Honey Symposium (2014) and Oculus (2019). Her poetry, often stylistically experimental and venturing into the unorthodox, is replete with poignant and incisive diction hinting at roiling turbulence beneath the neatly-parsed lines. In an interview with the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, Mao noted, “I think the anger is definitely there, perhaps right beneath the surface. I haven’t written a plainly angry poem in a while—I think that this book I’m trying to work toward that, but it is a challenge.”

PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT by Jen Liu. 2018.

Jen Liu is an visual artist based in New York, USA. Their work spans the mediums of video, choreography, biomaterial and painting, and centres issues of “national identity, gendered economics, neoliberal industrial labor, and the re-motivating of archival artifacts”.  A leftist, Liu’s work aims to move beyond the abstraction of traditional leftist approaches, embrace a materialist position via physical forms, and in doing so to“force economic and scientific research through familiar cultural tropes”. 

PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT is an ongoing project which aims to “alter the genetic material of cow cells in order to carry secret messages of labor activism for female factory workers in South China” . Through video and 3D animation, paintings and sculptures, the project moves between sites of reproductive and industrial labour in intervening at a point where genetic engineering and labor activism meet.

The video for PINK SLIME CAESAR SHIFT can be viewed here.

Selected Works: Foot Locker. Bao Ho. Mural/street art. 2018.

Bao Ho is a self-taught artist from Hong Kong and mainly works with street art, murals, and illustrations. She launched her career in 2015, and that year she won the Hong Kong leg of the Secret Walls art battle. Since then she has collaborated with many international brands including Foot Locker, Nike, Google, and Starbucks, and has travelled around the world working on projects.

The artwork pictured is a special commission work for Foot Locker done in 2018, celebrating the brand’s return to Hong Kong after twenty years. 

Photos courtesy of Bao Ho.