Besides writing, Chen Yuhong also draws and paints. What influence does art have on your writing?

Chen: Studying painting and drawing taught me to rely on my eyes, and not on preconceived notions of what I think things look like. Any one thing takes on different appearances depending on where and when you see it. And so what you should draw are the details of the difference, not the fixed image (or notion) of the thing that you carry around in your head.

All arts are related at the root. Studying painting taught me that abstraction, in fact, comes from concreteness; an abstraction doesn’t come from nothing.

Once, in Vancouver, an oil painting teacher of mine explained this principle to me using a flower vase in front of a piece of red silk as an example. The teacher said, “You don’t have to paint the vase to paint the vase.” The point was that if I painted what I saw in the red (the red silk), then the vase would appear all on its own. I think this is an example of “negative capability” — the ability to look at the negative aspect of things — that Keats said all poets needed to have. All arts are related at the root. Studying painting taught me that abstraction, in fact, comes from concreteness; an abstraction doesn’t come from nothing. What we look for in a painting is color, composition, and brushwork. It is the same with poetry; we look in the language for highly individualized brushwork, color, and compositional sense.

Have you tried other art forms, Amang?

Amang: I like to go to the theater, and reading plays is for me about the most enjoyable reading experience there is. I have always wanted to mess around with playwriting, but I haven’t yet. I also really like film, and in early 2010 I finally took the plunge, so to speak. I went in deep, to the bottom of the ocean, and I encountered the angels and the devils of filmmaking. It was thrilling and stimulating. My camera went everywhere with me; it went on every job. Our first impossible job was chasing down a recurring dream of mine and some hazy memories.

FROM Express Mail, Address Unknown, 2011
BY Li-Ching Hung
REPRINTED WITH THE AUTHOR’S PERMISSION

The first “child” that my camera and I had together was the documentary Express Mail, Address Unknown, which was on the program at the 2011 Women Make Waves Film Festival (2011台灣國際女性影展). The rising tide of my dreams broke over the levees of my life and overwhelmed me.

The strong hands of this tide reached into my eyes, ears, and pores and wouldn’t let me alone until I gave in and let myself be pulled out to the sea on waves. There were many aftershocks, and they left me even more drenched and dizzy. At the film festival, the audience asked me what my plans for my next film were, and I said I might make a sequel. But a sequel would be even harder, and I need to wait. I need to wait for the right weather, the right wind, and a different “me.” Recently, I have been taking my camera into the mountains, where I live and study with the indigenous Atayal hunters. I have no preconceived idea of what this new film is about, and that is because documentaries can’t be created according to a plan. They resist any plan.