Response poem to an artwork, commissioned by the Auckland Art Gallery for their Year of the Snake Lunar New Year Festival. Performed 1 February 2025.

We had a dream

So, by way of introduction: this is a Snake Year poem for Yang Fudong’s 2014 piece
‘Tianse: Xin Nuxìng II’ / 天色：新奴性 II / ‘The Coloured Sky: New Women II,
which was commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery &
the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and like all his work,
is an immersive multi-screen video installation,
all moody, cinematic, long scenes with no dialogue, on repeat
on wraparound wall screens, and before this one,
typically in black and white, often drawing on
classic Shanghai cinema or the French New Wave.
He’s one of China’s best-known artists – and one of my
I suppose
problematic faves. I first saw his work
in 2007 at the Venice Biennale – very fancy – the piece was called
Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest.
I’ve seen his art everywhere
I’ve lived, China, London, Europe, he’s a big name
with the scale to follow you around,
no matter how hard you
diaspora yourself.
He did not specify whether the New Women 2
are also intellectuals
but at least they get to wear
clothes
unlike his New Women I, from 2013, a less
widely-reviewed
work.
These are just a few stills from New Women 2,
because we can’t put on
the whole installation,
that’s what the poem is for, to give you
a sense of that feeling, cos
Yang Fudong is a mood
a whole one like the moon becomes whole
and a moongate
– is a hole?
and inside it
we had a dream

the poem’s started properly now, by the way

we had a dream that our minds were running
frantic through the black and white forest, running
through a backlog of aching ice
encasing a snake two decades asleep the mind runs
and it runs but the bodies are
frozen in a pose of running and running
frantic through the black and white forest,
seized by the eye of a slow pan to a melancholy tune
all the cast caught, drifting
on the sea’s mysteries, drifting
in and out of sleep, in and out of frame,
in and out of a moody castle
riding an arthouse horse along a beach
and carefully through a doorway
into a new cold void between four walls
that are giant windows onto other rooms running
and running scenes, heydays of here and there, running
like molten snow, the flicker and the loop
leap through another window into the next
cold void wrapped and held tight by a four-sided
dream escaping into another dream until

No wait look
what exactly is our objective here Yang Fudong?
Your ladies are asking – eh, Yang Xiānshēng ah!
to where are our glances always shifting
up what hill are we running?
what is our, ah – zhenmelaishuo yah –
our motivation?

finally FINALLY

we crash into this burning horizon,
technicolour sirens wrecked
on yet another beach.
Are we in paradise
or stranded influencers crying at the Fyre Festival,
Antipodean edition? Aotearoa
paid Yang Fudong for this one, his first ever
in full colour. His sad eyes said:
New Zealand, your tourist sky is fake right??
this beach is 90 miles of endless screaming
dusk infected like a face spreads a smile, a psychotic
break as art commissions hashtag sponsored content
#VintageOnePieceAgainstAColdWarSunset

The weather darkens, it’s
basic Mandarin time
Tianse: Weather is a colour
Tianqi: Weather is a vibe
They raise their glasses
over a banquet no-one eats –
appetites lost from serving
so
much
cunt.

A cast of seven, awkward as
the limbs on a second language,
yes an overexplanatory tongue
yes a walking shétou
yes a Laurie Anderson line:
Yes that’s true
A snake with legssss

Oh! to be beside her
oh to be the seaside
a slave 2 U
coiled inside a huang shé
we had a dream you’d
film us in a studio in Glen Eden
dan meiyou shé zai zher, sir.
She who saw the shé seen
in full yansè, I, albino yellow
draped around her
whisper, illicit, like the sea –
‘hweeeee
shhhhhould
unionisssssse’

Frozen under lights
Yang Fudong’s prisoner denied me
my rights. eh, Yang Xiānshēng ah
the snake was confused
about what it was trying to say
snakes are illegal here anyway

Oh to be surrounded by
an artificial lake
with a thirsty horse on strike
But let us place a pair of deer here
a pest species but stuffed
so it’s okay
to tell me again Yang Fudong
of your future nostalgia
for a vanishing point beyond our sightlines,
past the dreaded haze rising, uncertain,
through playhouse filters
casting penicillin pink shadows
that lie between us
like significant glances
from subject to object and back again, 

Yang Fudong is it you
who is trapped in here with me
in your mirror-cage, yearning
for our skins we’ve shucked already,
do you too, hold this silent feeling
that something lost
will always hold you,
knotted, still, in this escape room
– and you aren’t even an immigrant –
what hope do we have then, here.

Yang Fudong, why are your eyes so red
are you crying or is it the particulate matter
blowing in from Australian bushfires?
We are the ones who have to live here,
stranded and loosely improvising.

Yang Fudong, can you see us through the wall
we smashed through, tapping now at wrists
holding them to our ears like times past,
for it’s time, it’s past time.
The thunderstorm is packing down,
the unsalted ocean drains out to the Ring Road
Only the sound in the
seashells is true and it
is
a secret.

xinnian kuaile
Happy New Year
wanshiruyi
may all your dreams
come true.