project#8 - commercial poetry
catalogue of imageries and ideas
The Proposal
To create a bilingual (Chinese and English) found poetry collection through show titles of commercial art galleries
For monolingual shows, translate the titles as informed by the artworks in them
In more words…
Like found images, found texts can also glimpse the shared imagination and vocabulary surrounding a particular topic or milieu. In turn, this reflects aspirations and value systems. For an industry as showy and optics-conscious as the commercial art galleries, I wonder how things would look if we surveyed the show titles. The titles are like the covers of books—acting as the first impressions of the show. While bringing them together could create new meanings from associative logic.
Having worked with shows and catalogues disseminated through more than one language, I know not all galleries (can afford to) take the same care and nuanced approach to translating their content. There is also the age-long dilemma and struggle with the fracturing or transformation of imageries when content is shared across languages and cultures. That is translation loss and the weird transitory space between languages. While that is uncomfortable to me, it’s also interesting, just like how images (imageries) and words have that uneasy but symbiotic relationship in the arts.