New interview with Beijing-based poet and musician Yan Jun, on Asymptote.
To Save My Own Life With Experimentation: A Conversation with Yan Jun
by Matt Turner
Yan Jun is a poet, experimental musician, impresario, critic—and, notably, a creative driving force in Beijing’s experimental music scene since the early 2000s. In his illustrious career, he has published not only his own poetry and music, but also the work of colleagues who might not easily be seen elsewhere. A local fixture with global presence, he’s been featured journals of both literary and sound culture, played in venues from Beijing to Berlin, and has collaborated with many international musicians. His work stands out for spanning genres and straddling media, and his perspective is important not only as an artist, but also as someone negotiating different traditions.
I first came to know of Yan Jun through his Sub Jam label, and subsequently through his Waterland Kwanyin experimental music night, which featured different musicians every week for improvised performances. Much later, I had the pleasure of co-translating (with Haiying Weng) his 2018 sequence of irreverent poetry, 100 Poems of 10,000 Elephants, and then his new book of prose, Berlin Reflections, a collection of reminiscences and reflections on aesthetics and the function of art. In this following interview, I spoke with him on his various writerly and musical projects, which span intimate experiences of ritualized sound-making to large-scale installations of ambient imagination.
Matt Turner (MT): To begin, can you say a little bit about your poetry, as well as the relationship of your music to poetry?
Yan Jun (YJ): I started writing poetry when I was thirteen years old, when around half of my classmates were also writing it—it was a bit of a trend in school for a while. Back then, I thought I would be a poet, but I just spent many years pursuing the phantom of being a poet, complete with romantic cliches like being drunk on stage, having a chaotic personal life, that kind of thing.
When I began making music around 2003, the way I wrote changed, and I slowly adopted a rather quiet and reflective style. Of course, my music had already been already going that way; eventually, I no longer wanted to scream out in public as either a musician or poet. After some turns musically, I arrived on a new stage—where I no longer concerned myself with reputation, but instead allowed myself to make stupid, or even failed music.
At the time I didn’t know what that meant, but I felt I could be a stupid musician making my own sounds and performing my own way. The poems then, also changed—from feigning a quiet Buddhism to writing from my tiny and odd mind. I’ve been away from the poetry scene long enough that I write only for myself now. It’s really wonderful to give up on being a good poet or a good musician. Of course, I’d still say that my poems deal with my past, and its phantoms.
MT: In Berlin Reflections, you write about growing up rather humbly in Lanzhou, in western China. Would you say that your background, growing up far removed from the busy, cosmopolitan atmosphere of Beijing, influenced your initial approach to being a writer and musician?
YJ: As far as being culturally humble, yes. Most writers then were very into grand narratives, but they had quite rural backgrounds. That’s how modernism was selectively picked up—as just another grand thing. When rock ‘n’ roll invaded my city, it was with a broken heart, half-full of conventional ethics.
I can’t really escape this background, and it might be a part of my landscape as much as the mountains and the river are. Even though I was a provincial, I managed to become quite adept at mail-ordering books by the time I was eleven years old. Later, I also took out subscriptions to magazines about literature, art, film, and music. Eventually, before I left Lanzhou in 1999, I developed many contacts in poetry and underground rock around the country. At the time, I wasn’t a musician but a music critic; people sent me demos and releases and I sent out letters and articles. It’s better for a critic to be outside of the scene—I felt like I was living at the center of the universe.
As far as Berlin Reflections, Julia Gerlach, who was then heading the music department at DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service), asked me if I’d be interested in writing a small book about music or Berlin, or really anything. That’s how it began. The resulting text was one of my attempts to get rid of the male-dominated style of music, writing, and living. I’ve never wanted to write a formal book about this kind of music or life, as they both take the form of constellations or plants, but regarding Berlin Reflections, a more informal, genre-defiant book like Peter Handke’s The Weight of the World would be a comparison. The “reflections” of the title was taken from the general atmosphere of that book.
MT: In addition to your music and poetry, you write criticism, publish, and organize arts events—recently the Miji concert series, which features different local experimental musicians on a monthly basis, for example. Can you say a bit about the motivation behind these?
YJ: I went crazy trying to build the world I’d like to live in—through connections to friends, to objects, to minds, to the Constitutive Other. . . If there wasn’t a rock concert in town, I’d organize one. If labels weren’t signing my friends’ bands, then I’d release the music myself. Since my school days, I’ve been very active with organizing events and putting literature magazines together. I might have been a bit manic about it all. After the Waterland Kwanyin concerts (held weekly between 2005–2010), I was faced with another urgent desire—to save my life by pursuing new musical experiments. Of course, it wasn’t really about life or death, but it was a pretty heavy existential crisis.
Writing about music started with another motive. I began writing my first column because I wanted two friends of mine—they lived in Beijing, where the paper was based—to be able to read what I had to say. That then became my career and life for ten years. Originally, I knew nothing about music—it was just feelings—and then I learned, little by little. I lived as a classic rock critic (though I didn’t die young). Mostly I wrote about my friends and that circle because I considered them as part of myself, and I made friends with people if they weren’t yet my friends. But then, after the disappearance of the underground rock scene, and my eventual acceptance by mainstream magazines, I no longer enjoyed writing criticism.
In most of my artistic efforts, I’ve been able to work with a community that made me feel accepted and connected. Sometimes—but only after years, like with Miji—a sort of biosphere of community even grows from no community at all.
MT: In Berlin Reflections, you ask whether the next direction in music could be something like simultaneity. If I understand correctly, two musicians could perform unrelated pieces of music side-by-side, but together the pieces might be regarded as a unified piece of music. There are also poems—John’s Ashbery’s “Litany,” for instance—that ask for two voices to read simultaneously. Do you think this could be a valuable direction for poetry to continue to explore?
YJ: There are many pioneers who have done all kinds of experiments in poetry—concrete poetry, action poetry, sound poetry, and even more are being invented now. The mainstream of poetry sees itself as a high-ranking spokesperson for human civilization; the avant-garde instead takes humble and wild paths to live as—and for—humans. But I can see that the gap between the two is smaller nowadays. Simultaneity naturally happens once poets give up their egos—as the central speaker, the legislator, and the master of language; seeing it is about seeing the various forms that all cultures take. Gertrude Stein once mentioned that forms of art and life participate in the undercurrents our time; when we see simultaneity, we free ourselves from the man-made order of things (and specifically man-made, instead of woman- or child-made).
MT: You’ve also written about one of the more difficult directions in the arts: boring, long-duration performances in the way of Steve Reich-styled minimalism, or performances involving simple actions like eating. In your experience, can duration performances unite people who are interested in different genres of live experience?
YJ: The longest performance I’ve ever done was with friends, and it lasted twenty-four hours. In 2004, with Wu Quan on video and FM3 on music, we set up at one end of a huge exhibition space. The sounds were emanating through and resonating in the whole space, very slow and spare. Sometimes it consisted of droning, and sometimes glitches. And we also used field recordings to elaborate on the soundscape. Perhaps there were a few lines of poetry as well. But we did far less than the space and situation itself did. People came and went, probably thinking: “These guys are dealing with time in a longer way than we do.” The idea was to create a window that looks out onto something you’re about to experience—but are not experiencing yet. Then, as you’re experiencing it, you don’t need the window anymore because you’ve become the view itself. A view, a landscape, needs no skill or knowledge to qualify itself; one just has to live with it and let time pass. That’s why anyone, or at least anyone who’s curious, can become a part of this performance, giving up the identity of a niche audience member.
Nowadays, more young people have become bored with the dreams that the society has pushed them to pursue. There are more “losers.” So, it’s easier to enjoy time just as it is. One person told me that he plays the sleeping recordings I collected as ambient noise. He’s using them without defining and dividing.
MT: Do you think there might be a way to cross divisions beyond the fine arts—toward architecture, for instance? Or into more mundane areas of life?
YJ: Architecture is a great aim, and a difficult one. But it’s too controlled by authorities and big companies. At the very least, it involves money and a concordance between neighbors. The fine arts are protected, and artists should not forget this privilege, but thus far, architecture too often exposes the greed, fear, and stupidity in us all. In this sense, to change architecture would be to change everybody’s minds. First, we’d need more people to live artistic lives and think in artistic ways. Only then would we see fine arts and architecture join, and perfect the mundane areas of life.
MT: COVID forced many of us to be more localized than we would have been otherwise. Your own work in particular has been heavily informed by international dialogue—with European musicians, but also with poets like Hsia Yü. Because of the geographical isolation the pandemic caused, did you need new strategies for making and thinking about art?
YJ: Not really. I did a lot of online performances, collaborations, and talks during that time. I also did a lot of video work. Essentially, I work with anything available. Since isolation and depression were the materials, I worked with them. Perhaps those strategies were already there, but it’s important to work with one’s own reality—whatever it is. Now, I’m more connected to this dense, local reality: far away from the reality of travel. That’s fine. Not good or bad, but just fine.
MT: The Miji concert series has been an innovative series of experimental performances, staged primarily in people’s apartments in Beijing—outside of official venues and without the publicity that would accompany live houses or other more public venues. I wonder if these apartment concerts “translate” the performances a bit. Can you say something about the reasons for staging performances in apartments, and the effects the apartments have had on the performances?
YJ: The Miji concerts took place in various venues until they moved into my own studio—which is a flat in a normal Beijing high-rise—on late 2017. There’s another project I’m doing, a living room tour, where I go to others’ homes and play whatever I (and pal performers) find there. Swedish artist Leif Elggren did an exhibition in an apartment in the 1970s at someone’s home, and nothing was added or removed or changed. The audience was invited to see an ordinary apartment. What a fantastic puncture, and how revealing! It’s almost a miracle! Music happens everywhere once you set up its basic conditions of time, space, performer, and audience.
I believe that small and large events are fundamentally equal. Like a mandala, you draw a real world on a piece of paper. It’s not inspired by crap like “participatory art” or the trend of house party concerts. When the living room tour project started, I felt like I was losing the trust of some old friends and had departed from the warmth of that community. So it became rather like a religion at the time. Now I don’t have to take it so seriously, but still, it’s about doing something, anything, or nothing in a mundane environment—and treating it as everything. It’s alright to do any stupid thing in a place where you share snacks and tea with people; nobody says it’s fucking performance art (and in China, this term is the emperor’s new clothes). We turn our boring lives into minimal ritual, and in doing so, we live together for a while.
MT: Finally, I want to end on a question about your relationship to the traditional arts of China. Since “traditional” is often another way of saying “ideology,” how have traditional arts affected or influenced your own work or thinking?
YJ: My family had no such environment for me as a kid. We were a normal military family. I played war games long before I could read, so traditional arts to me were, first, Qinqiang Opera (秦腔) and Hua’er (花儿) sung by nobodies on the street, and then the radio. As a reader, I learned traditional literature later on as part of my education, but I’ve never been an expert. The thinking of Laozi and Zhuangzi, of Buddhist philosophy, that was popular in the local underground rock scene before I left Lanzhou. I enjoy both scholar art and folk art.
Normally, when people are talking about Chinese traditional arts, they only focus on high art: emptiness and things like that. But there are ghosts and madness as well. If you don’t see such elements in the typical modernist way, then you can grasp the artistic landscape as a whole. But it’s very easy to fall into cliches.
I’d rather see Chinese-ness in works and objects apparently not related to it—for example, very full and harsh noise, or traditional thinking in the context of modernity, information media, and dictatorship. This trains me—helps my Chinese eyes and ears. I don’t like to pretend that I live in a different time or space. I am a Chinese, but I’m not the Chinese, and I think this Chinese-ness can be discovered through art, and over a longer time period, instead of with so much explanation.
Yan Jun is a poet and musician based in Beijing. For literature, he writes poems, notes and diaries, and a few stories. Sometimes he uses the pen name Luo Wanxiang 罗万象, which means Everything in the Universe (but something is missing), or Luo the 10,000 Elephants. For music he uses body, noise, and concept—and field recording for experimental kinds of music or non-music. His recent favorite instrument is sweet potato noodles.
Matt Turner is a poet and Chinese-English translator based in New York City. He is the author of three books of poetry, and translator of Lu Xun, Ou Ning, Hu Jiujiu, and others. He is assistant editor (poetry) for Asymptote.
Posted by: Matt Turner <mateo.tornero@gmail.com>