One of the projects I’ve been working on this year is a project exploring Liu Xie’s Wenxin diaolong 文心雕龍, or The Heart of Literature and the Carving of Dragons and its contemporary significance and resonance. I have been fascinated with Liu Xie’s medieval text for a large part of the past two decades, and so when with my social enterprise, Wind&Bones, we saw that there was an opportunity for grant funding from the British Council Connections Through Culture programme, we put in a bid, and secured the funding we needed.
On the project, we worked with Dr Sipei Lu from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts, and brought together a stellar group of writers and translators. Alongside myself and my Wind&Bones collaborator Dr Hannah Stevens, we worked with poet Ningli Deng, scholar and writer Yuhang Zhang, writer and artist Zhenhao Shi, and translator Poppy Toland.
We had an online meeting to talk in English and Chinese about the Wenxin diaolong, and to share a reading of three chapters of the text. Then we went away to write our own responses. The resulting series of works are available in both English and Simplified Chinese on the project website.
We’re planning a final project presentation online on the 21st October 2023. The details are still being finalised, so I’ll post again when they are.
