Ink dot painting by Bei Dao, from the series “The Moment.” Photograph courtesy of Bei Dao.

Our new Fall issue includes an excerpt from Bei Dao’s book-length poem Sidetracks, translated from the Chinese by Jeffrey Yang. In Sidetracks, Bei Dao reflects on his turn to making ink-dot paintings like the one here.

In April 2012, while with his family on a beach in Hong Kong, Bei Dao suffered a stroke that severely affected his language abilities. After a month of trying to learn how to read all over again, he was assessed by a speech-language pathologist to be at only 30 percent equivalency. Daily conversation was difficult; the words he depended on for his life and art would possibly never return. It was an unprecedented crisis that he later compared in an essay to being “like an animal trapped in a cage.” (I’m reminded of these lines Bei Dao’s friend Tomas Tranströmer wrote after a paralyzing stroke, translated from the Swedish by Robin Fulton: “I am carried in my shadow / like a violin / in its black case.”) While recovering in the hospital, Bei Dao started to doodle and brush calligraphy, and when he returned home, he started to paint, channeling the lyric impulse from the void of words into physical images. Thirty years had passed since he’d last painted a picture.

Bei Dao’s first paintings in this period were composed of repeating lines that formed an abstract landscape resembling surging hills or waves. Feeling he lacked the necessary skill and technique to manipulate the plastic line, he abandoned it and turned to one of the most fundamental elements of Chinese painting: the ink dot. A longtime photographer, he compares the ink dot to the pixel of a photograph. In his book-length poem Sidetracks, which will be published in English by New Directions in 2024, he describes the creative process of ink-dot painting like this:

nebular ink dots on rice paper—in accord with the cosmos painting pictures makes me euphoric ink dots cluster disperse depending on the flow of random scattering forest beyond the borders of language good fortune depends on disaster / disaster conceals good fortune I am aimless freedom listening closely to the whispers of snowflakes guarding the vortex of day and night at the center of the mysterious river

Four years after his stroke, Bei Dao’s Chinese language abilities had improved dramatically, and a new medical assessment showed a recovery of over 80 percent. He continued his painting practice, though, and started to write poetry again. In 2018, a year before he turned seventy, Bei Dao had his first-ever painting exhibition at the Galerie Paris Horizon, located just north of the Centre Pompidou. In the essay he wrote for the exhibition, he contrasts the oil-based pointillism of an artist like Seurat with the watery ink dots of the East, where the tones and textures of the so-called five shades of ink in traditional Chinese painting must be naturally integrated with the brush and the rice paper to form a single whole. And as the water evaporates, the ink colors change, creating unexpected effects. He has experimented with using the cold colors of Japanese green ink alongside the warm colors of brown ink, while using sumi ink to deepen the tones and textures through a rhythmic layering. Around the time he began his new painting practice, he made a pilgrimage from Hong Kong to many cities across the mainland to learn about traditional Chinese medicine. He has received treatment from eight different traditional Chinese medical doctors who are well trained in the dialectical principles of yin and yang and the five elements as originally presented in the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, which was compiled over two thousand years ago.

The artist Xu Bing—he and his wife, the poet Zhai Yongming, were the first collectors of Bei Dao’s paintings—wrote an essay for Bei Dao’s Paris exhibition in which he links his work with that of the Chinese maximalist artists: a loose grouping defined in the early aughts to classify work that resonates with Western minimalism but that is also, as the art historian Gao Minglu has it, closely tied to “the spiritual experience of the artist in the process of creation as a self-contemplation outside and beyond the artwork itself.” Xu Bing suggests that a maximalist style of compressed intensity and repetition are generally found in three kinds of artists: the formally untrained, such as the Aboriginal artists of Papunya in Australia; the physically or mentally ill, such as Yayoi Kusama; and contemporary artists who “dress up like a god and play a ghost.” The painting by Bei Dao shown here is from an ongoing series titled Cike (The moment), which Xu Bing writes is a reflection of “a mixture of these three categories.”

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections Line and Light; Hey, Marfa; Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium.

On Kawara, Moon Landing (detail), 1969, from the Today series (1966–2013), acrylic on canvas, three panels, each 61″ x 89″. Installation view, Glenstone Museum. © One Million Years Foundation. Photo: Ron Amstutz. Courtesy Glenstone Museum.

Not long ago, I volunteered to take part in a performance at the contemporary art museum near my home. Very little is known about the artist who created the piece. Even in a recent obituary, his date of death and the names of survivors were deliberately withheld, “in keeping with his lifelong penchant for privacy.” In death, as in life and art, his biography has remained publicly minimalist.

We do know that he was born on December 24, 1932, in Kariya, Japan. And so he would have been roughly four months from his thirteenth birthday when nuclear bombs were dropped on his country. In his late twenties, he moved to Mexico City with his father, the director of an engineering company, where he continued to study art, eventually moving to Paris, then New York, and wherever else he lived. His art-making turned from early figurative paintings to the conceptual and process-based works he became known for, along with his reclusiveness.

Private lives are always ordinary to someone. It is said that the artist enjoyed seeing friends, drinking, conversing, traveling the world (a lifelong passion). Over the years, he sent postcards and telegrams from distant locales with messages like I GOT UP AT 9:04 A.M. and I AM STILL ALIVE to galleries, artists, and friends, this becoming part of his artistic production, akin to the mail art conceived by others in his generation. He established permanent residences in at least a few of the most cosmopolitan metropolises in the world, either successively or simultaneously, though he never revealed anything about his own experiences of these places, his artistic persona more like a wandering ghost, floating around the globe, creating a sort of code that only he held the keys to, dispersing, or erasing, himself into matter-of-fact one-line messages, the monochrome dates, newsprint, and coordinates of his paintings, lists of names and years, color-coordinated calendars.

In an early black-and-white photograph, the shape of the artist’s face, the tilt of his head in relation to his inquisitive expression, made me think of a sparrow. Coincidentally, long after I had seen the photograph, a close friend of a friend of his told me that the artist loved to gamble, particularly when playing the game mah-jongg, also known as “sparrows,” popular among the adults of my own family when I was a child, the endless clack-clacking of tiles into winning combinations during visits and parties, the intermittent shouts of a triumphant “Peng!,” the cracking of dried melon seeds between teeth. This friend of a friend of the artist told me that her friend often played in these sparrows games with the artist and his wife, and said that he was, no doubt, addicted to it, and would play far into the night. One could even say that he was addicted to gambling in general, as he bet on cards, sports, and horses; he was lured, one imagines, by the intertwined promise of chance and odds with a mythical abandon worthy of Dostoyevsky.

For an artist of such austere and restrained work, whose practice of art was as deeply ritualistic as it was self-effacing, this vice added a pleasantly decadent warmth to his conceptual world. A warmth that extended to the subtle lightness and humor in the work itself, which along with its open-ended seriality—a seriality that subsumed each individual artifact—imparted a feeling of mournful playfulness, like children throwing dice in a bomb shelter. With purposeful intent, he refused the commonly performed public role of the artist, choosing instead to guard, or cultivate, the mystery of the creator behind the art, as far as such mystery needs a public gaze to exist in the first place, while continuing to make and exhibit art over a lifetime of professional success.

For the newest incarnation of the performance piece, originally completed in the early seventies, a table and two chairs were set up on a low platform in the empty basement room of the museum, a former box-making and printing plant perched on a leveled hill, train tracks running with the river below. The basement was dark, unlit; sunlight filtered in from a line of ground-level windows along the south wall, the warehouse-like hall gradually darkening as one walked away from the windows, past the amply spaced rows of flared cement columns, making the space feel like an industrial Mezquita-Catedral. The digital lights of the sound and recording equipment flickered in a shadowy area beyond the stairs; faces in the milling audience were difficult to discern from even close distances.

Two participants—one male, one female—sat at the table in the center of the room. Their amplified voices droned on through the darkness. A giant black binder lay open before each of them, illuminated by a small desk lamp. Within the binder were pages and pages of typed dates arranged in columns, going back hundreds of thousands of years, progressing from the distant, geological past to the distant, geological present. Each pair of performers read the dates in chronological progression in hour-long shifts.

One of the organizers of the event found me and introduced me to my partner. We exchanged greetings but didn’t have time to chat as our part of the performance would soon begin. The organizer didn’t give us any specific instructions about how to read the dates but told us to take turns and read slowly and clearly into the microphone, and if we liked, we could mark the dates as we read them with the black ballpoint pen on the table. Like the other males, I would read the odd years; my partner, the evens.

We took our seats at the illuminated table and began to read. Back and forth our voices echoed, creeping slowly along the Middle Pleistocene like a prehistoric slug, alternating years in the sheltering darkness, our voices lost in the hollow concrete chamber, bouncing off the pillars as visitors drifted through the hallowed wilderness, stopping to watch for a moment before moving on, our awareness focused completely on the printed columns of dates, a numerical map that guided us through the breaking dawn of our predecessors. I tried out different variations of pronouncing the years: one hundred ninety-seven thousand and five hundred thirty-nine B.C., one nine seven five three nine B.C., one hundred and ninety-seven thousand five hundred and thirty-nine B.C., and so on, marking a black dot at the end of each line with the pen. Wave after wave of the mundanity of existence washed over us, voided of self-expression, cardinal rhythm a function of time. Without effort or aspiration, we circled a meditative state, the ancient years our spoken mantra, a secular liturgy, time compressing time, expanding time.

The circle broke when my partner read the wrong date.

I paused for a brief moment, waiting for a possible self-correction that didn’t come, then read the next date anyway. Time leaked into timelessness. When she read another wrong number, I turned my head toward her, covering the microphone, and whispered, “I think you meant … ,” to which she replied with a soft, “Oh, fuck … ,” directly into the mic, followed emphatically by the correct date. As my partner continued to stray nervously from the text, sometimes casually reading my date, I decided to ignore her, refocusing my efforts on my own evolutionary progress. I could imagine a Neanderthal leaping out from the dark night and pushing her binder off the table. Did we have a rebel in our midst, resisting her rigid role with a sinister performance of her own? A conceptual performance within the performance that flipped the bird at the famous, enigmatic artist and precious museum, telling them to take all their meaningless dates and shove them up their ruptured time continuum? Were we fools for voluntarily playing this game of rigged consciousness, that the full import of the artist’s work, of contemporary art in general, could be understood only on the auction block, where admiration swells and swells with the dividing marketplace? Would the dissident go to such subtle lengths to make her point, whatever it was? More pressingly, would someone from the museum quietly escort her off the stage?

An arc can be traced from the original nuclear trauma to the artist’s first comprehensive retrospective—“Silence”—that opened at a prominent New York museum not long after he died. His earliest surviving drawings and paintings are of mutilated bodies in a confined space, body parts in a bland, tiled bathroom setting, and death-mask portraits, or what he called “thanatophanies,” or “apparitions of death”—none of which were shown in the retrospective. Most of his early work he apparently destroyed. The young artist once said at a conference, “The menace of matter and all kinds of anxieties are felt clearly in every moment of daily life.” He said, “Politics and economic anxieties permeate and overwhelm not only the painterly condition, but also the reality in which we live our individual lives.” As time passes, his conceptual turn seems more and more aligned with the Upper Paleolithic cave paintings in Altamira than any particular modern trend—an art of profundity in anonymity, of repetition and self-imposed rules that, in his case, evokes an external uniformity that concealed a broken interiority, like the special branches of white charcoal he wanted hidden beneath the finished wooden floorboards of the permanent gallery room of his multilingual date paintings.

The hour ended, our time expired. The organizer came over to thank us, avoiding eye contact with my partner, who looked happy and relieved, saying how much fun that was and that she couldn’t believe she had gotten through it.

“You had a little trouble, didn’t you?” the organizer said to her, nodding reflectively. She brushed it off, rustling through her shoulder sack. No reply forthcoming, the organizer thanked us again and walked over to the next pair of eager volunteers waiting on the sidelines.

While I was wondering if I should say anything to my partner, she turned to me and exclaimed in a rush: “I’m so sorry about the mistakes. I’m actually severely dyslexic, but I told myself I just had to do this. Thank you so much.”

Before I could reply, she hugged me and walked away, the echo of the years trailing behind her: 197,540 B.C., 197,541 B.C., 197,542 B.C. …

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collection Hey, Marfa and the editor of a forthcoming expanded edition of Mary Oppen’s autobiography Meaning a Life. Read his poem “Ancestors,” which appears in the Winter 2019 issue.

Kazumi Tanaka, Girl, 2007, oolong on paper, 10″ x 10″.

Kazumi Tanaka works with wood, bone, sound, and her own hair. She works with plaster, glass, paint, and light. She’s remade the furniture of her mother’s only “tiny corner of … comfort space” in miniature—every drawer and door perfectly functional, with the use of tweezers. She’s made a bird’s nest out of hundreds of stainless-steel pins. She has indigo-dyed silk fabric using a traditional shibori-zome technique, stitching the fabric with cotton thread and intertwining it with rope before arranging it, at the Fabric Workshop in Philadelphia, into a rippling umbilical form on a low, square altar draped with white linen.

As a gift for a friend, Kazumi made a tiny oval “Box of Wisdom” out of cherrywood and copper nails, in which she placed utensils sculpted out of her wisdom teeth, on a pillow of her hair. For another friend, she carved an achromatic flute, tuned to the key of C, out of the leg bone of a deer. 

She once made a “temporal drawing” of fireflies aglow in a ring-shaped wire structure covered with tulle netting. This “happening,” as she calls it with a Fluxus echo, has its roots in a family memory: the night the war ended in Japan, a group of girls that included her mother, only a teenager at the time, couldn’t bear to wait for the bus that would pick them up the next morning from far out in the countryside, where they had been evacuated, and so they set out at midnight, walking the long, dark road home, guided by the silent, pulsating glow of fireflies.

Kazumi also draws with ink made from coffee and tea leaves. Some years ago, when I first visited her studio, she showed me a series of twelve tea-ink drawings she had completed, each image filling a specific portion of a ten-by-ten-inch paper sheet and summoned from a particular memory of her Osaka childhood. (She moved to New York in 1987, at age twenty-five, but is still reluctant to trade her Japanese passport for an American one.) She had expected the pictures to gradually fade with time, turning the weeks and months she had spent on each drawing into an aesthetic meditation on temporality and evanescent memory. But she stored the drawings carefully and rarely brought them out into the light, and as time passed, the images showed no signs of aging, the umber lines and shades even deepening against the pale-yellow paper.

Kazumi displayed the drawings for me on a table, each work covered with a square sheet she flipped, like the page of a book, to reveal the picture underneath, and then covered it again before moving on to the next image. The order of the drawings was deliberate, the kinds of tea leaves used for each drawing less so, but varied. Due to the small, intimate scale of the work and the act of turning each sheet to view the next unexpected image, it felt like an intensely private experience, akin to reading someone’s diary. And yet the detailed simplicity and finely measured strokes, the shifts in perspective and distance, the repetition of certain ritual objects, the specificity of the flowers, the changing position of the drawing on the page, which sometimes only filled a small part of the square space—all of these aspects spoke to the work’s art.

It brought to mind the double-leaf butterfly mounting of the classical Chinese album, an art form that emerged during the Tang as Buddhist sutras were being translated and passed around. Small, elusive, delicate, portable, the Chinese album merged poetry, calligraphy, and painting into a connected, serial practice of reading and seeing. Traditionally, these albums consisted of a sequence of images on a single—or mixed—genre or subject, such as flowers, birds, animals, human figures, views of a landscapes. The form sought to encompass the world in, say, a stalk of bamboo. Shitao’s Returning Home took the Chinese album into a new realm (it can be seen, no doubt, as a model of what it means to be avant-garde, to borrow a phrase from David Antin). In it, he pairs twelve paintings with twelve poems, alternating images of flower and plants with landscape views, while changing the calligraphic style of his poems according to the content and style of the paintings, or vice versa. A tiny wash of color doesn’t appear until the fifth leaf, on the face of the lonely journeyman, squinting from the cold in a skiff. Sometimes a poem only fills a small section of a leaf; other times it fills half a leaf or the full leaf.

Shitao’s album is an intensely personal work—one created at a tumultuous point in the life of the poet-painter, who was born a refugee the year the Manchus took over the Ming regime and who, after living almost forty years as an itinerant Buddhist monk, traveled to Beijing to accept the honor of a second audience with Emperor Kangxi but quickly became disillusioned with the “floating world” of the capital. A “ten-fold bitter coldness” overwhelmed him as he made his way home south to Yangzhou in 1692. He would make his album in late 1695, during another period of wandering.

I thought a lot about Returning Home when Kazumi asked me, a year or so after that day at her studio, if I’d like to write some poems to pair with her album of drawings, which she had—apparently not knowing anything about Shitao—titled “No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home.” And yet, if there is no returning home, what does “home” mean? If home across the sea in Japan fades away like a childhood memory? Becomes a sea of time impossible to cross? Even the monosyllables of the title sounded to me, not knowing Japanese, like they were reaching for some kind of original rhythm or way of being. Given the deeply personal nature of the pictures, how could any added text not become an intrusion? Despite these initial doubts, I set out with Shitao’s question in mind: “With respect to antiquity, how could I have learned from it without transforming it?”

At some point early on, I decided on a loose renga-like structure. Renga, that Japanese linked verse form abused by so many poets through the ages. As Hiroaki Sato, who has translated my poems into Japanese, writes in his upcoming book on haiku, renga traditionally alternates 5-7-5 and 7-7 syllable verses up to fifty times, for a total of a hundred verse units. It is normally composed by two or more poets. In in this case, Kazumi became the other poet, her images preordained verse units, so to speak. All the rules associated with renga I either adapted, ignored, or threw out the window, instead choosing a square field as the formal structure for each poem, spacing the lines within the field, the spaces determining the rhythm of the lines. It is a structural form I had used before when translating classical Chinese poetry, though here I widened the field to a consistent six inches (save a three-line opening poem), which seemed to work as a nice visual inner frame to the ten-by-ten-inch square sheet on which it was set. The placement of seasons, flowers, and such largely depended on the order of the images. And as readers can see, I followed a basic rule of linkage where the end of each poem directly foretells the image that follows it, while each poem dwells on the image it faces. This created an overall “heavenly” circular structure in conjunction with the “earthly” square page.

Our conversations became an important part of the collaboration. Kazumi has vivid memories of certain fairy tales and folktales her mother told her as a child. I didn’t want to fabricate, or project, any imagined memories into the narrative of her drawings, so absorbing the tone and story lines of these tales became an intuitive way for me to enter the images’ childhood space. When asking her about some of the specific objects in the pictures, like the talismans and cabinet shrines (drawings not included in the issue), she told me that her mother has been a longtime follower of Tenrikyo, a religion strongly influenced by both Shintoism and Buddhism. I discovered it was a fairly new religious practice, about a decade younger than Mormonism, founded in the nineteenth century by a peasant woman, Nakayama Miki, whose divine revelations are recorded in her Ofudesaki: Tip of the Writing Brush. Tenrikyo’s primary teaching is that the body is “a thing lent, a thing borrowed” from God the Parent, and so through hinokishin, or “daily service,” one can awaken the “divine intention” within us and attain the Joyous Life. To me, this connection felt like the golden thread that invisibly tied everything together—image to image, theme to theme, object to object—for all of the drawings were recalled and transmuted beneath the tea-infused tip of Kazumi’s brush. Words could be drawn into “divine intentions” (to riff on Mallarmé), and the sensations that arose from patient looking could allow meanings to ripple out in the wake of the words, in the empty spaces, like the musical phrasings in Tōru Takemitsu’s “I Hear the Water Dreaming.” At least this is how it feels thinking about the collaboration in retrospect.

Some adjustments were made for publication in The Paris Review. Six of the final twelve pairings, plus the three-line opening poem, aren’t included. I also adjusted the layout and line breaks of each poem to fit the skinnier trim size of the magazine, and at the editors’ request, cheated the linkage in the middle of the selection to stitch the first three poems of the series with the last three poems. Some might feel this wrong to do, but the square field of the poems gives the poetic sequence a flexibility of form that made such an adjustment possible. We also had to leave out Hiroaki Sato’s Japanese translations—these were the last elements added to the album and have become a crucial part of the whole, image and word returning “home / no home” to the original source—drawings, poems, and translations circling a memory space sealed with perpetual silence.

Read “No Home Go Home / Go Home No Home.”

Jeffrey Yang is the author of Vanishing-Line and An Aquarium, winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award.