Kuan Tao-Sheng, ‘Married Love’, from Women Poets of China by Kenneth Rexroth & Ling Chung (@atomictangerine) transcript
How do we categorise or classify things, thereby imagining them as one thing and not another? Unlike French or German, gender does not provide categories in Chinese, which groups things by something else entirely: shape.
Tiáo 条 is one of at least 140 classifiers and measure words in the Chinese language. It’s a measure word for long-narrow-shape things. For example, bed sheets, fish, ships, bars of soap, cartons of cigarettes, avenues, trousers, dragons, rivers.
These measure words embrace the ways in which shape imprints itself upon us, while playfully noticing the relationships between all things. The measure word kē 颗 (kernel) is used for small, roundish things, or objects that appear small: pearls, teeth, bullets and seeds, as well as distant stars and satellites.
Gēn 根, for thin-slender objects, will appear before needles, bananas, fried chicken legs, lollipops, chopsticks, guitar strings and matches, among a thousand other things. “Flower-like” objects gather under the word duo 朵: bunches of flowers, clouds, mushrooms and ears.
It’s endlessly fascinating to me how we attempt to group anything or anyone together, and how formations change. Philosopher Wang Lianqing charts how tiáo was first applied to objects we can pick up by hand (belts, branches, string) and then expanded outward (streets, rivers, mountain ranges).
And finally tiáo extended metaphorically. News and events are also classified with tiáo, perhaps because news was written in long vertical lines, and events, as the 7th-century scholar Yan Shigu wrote, arrive in lists “one by one, as (arranging) long-shaped twigs”.
Onwards the idea broadened, so that an idea or opinion is also “long-shaped news,” and in the 14th century, tiáo was used for spirit, which was imagined as straight, high and lofty. In language, another geometry is at work, gathering recurrences through time and space.
How do you draw flowers in chinese paintings
Xiao Wen Ju, photographed by Mikey Asanin and styled by Ron Hartleben for Harper’s Bazaar China September 2020
Li Songsong, known for using thick layers of paint to craft scenes that appear similar to fragmented memories, brings his historical look at China to Pace Gallery with the show “One of My Ancestors.” See more here.
CHAMOMILE: I’m tired and I want to go home,
but the tiger at the end of the street sits
shaking her head in the dark—not this way love, not anymore.
MATCHA: the monsters in your head are only
as real as you want them to be—is that why
you still linger in the aftermath?
PEARL MILK: March dawns a strange affair between
the forgotten and the yet-to-be, and we
all sink one by one. | noah fang liu
Xia Yifan, Zhang Hang and Lin Zhengjie by Lu Ziye for Fucking Young! Magazine - May 2020
“I’ll never reach you, even in dreams, my ruins of the heart, thoughts of you unending.”
— Li Po (701 to 762), from “Thoughts of you unending”
in: “Classical Chinese Poetry. An Anthology”, translated from Chinese by David Hinton
“Tears that are pearls, in ocean moonlight,”
— Li Shang-Yin, tr. by John A. Turner, from “A Golden Treasury of Chinese Poetry: 121 Classical Poems,”