煦 (Susie Zhu): Amphitheater

Year: 2023-03

Published by: Atmosphere Press

Pages: 74

ISBN: ‎9781639887989

Description

You can lie down and dream of another time in Amphitheater.

What is it like to be trapped (or emancipated) between the mirrors of text?
What happens when a girl/a reader/a writing enters a theater space hidden in a book operated by the generative mechanism of a Fibonacci sequence, consistently unraveling and escaping their comprehension?

Dive into the quicksand of this hybrid prose-poem—an experimental attempt at embodying dramatic stasis and bedazzlement of undulating imagery within a narrow poetic space that challenges the capacity of language and questions the rigidity of narrative.

In 煦’s Amphitheater, we find ourselves both in the center of the stage and below. Swept into the elliptical motion of the language, we explore this dreamlike landscape of meditation and contemplation on time, identity, and many more obscure matters without being unsettled by getting lost.

The light’s out. It is time to close our eyes and start seeing.

About the Author

煦 (Susie Zhu) is a multi-hyphenated poet-artist from China, based in Providence, RI, USA; most profoundly confused by everything including her own works, which confuse genres. She consider “book-making” as her main expressive medium, in which “book” refers to its most extensive, abstract and even obscure signification, including but not limited to: text, self-publication, artist’s book, sound/music composition, printmaking, multimedia installation, performance and video. Her “books” are encapsulated timespace for meditative and contemplative experiences, where she explores the alternatives for perception and expression.

She sees her artworks as poems and her poems exosomatic organs or flooded rooms.

It seems that 煦’s works are always enwrapped in a poetic air of quiet pensiveness, yet the audience find themselves catching a glimpse of some greater matters in their subtle breathing and trembling. 煦 sits down tenderly and thoughtfully in her works, ruminates, embraces all forms of confusion toward rigidity and “reality” and preserves them like how a dreamer records their dream. She lets her contemplations on time, being and many other obscure motifs into her “rites” (works) and have them dance mesmerizingly to the musicality of her works, spiritual but not religious. People are invited to pass by them, enter them, dream of them, forget or renounce their contour the way one who walks into the sea.