Interview with Poet and Artist Jiaoyang Li

By Joanna C. Valente

Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with Jiaoyang Li, an incredible poet and visual artist, about her processes, inspirations, and relationship to fashion - and how dressing and choosing objects provides a pivotal and crucial part of resistance and identity.

Check out the conversation below:

How do you decide the structure of your poems?

Writing in English, a civilized language that's not mine, I am probably an illiterate gesturing with phantom limbs. I yearn for structure, syntax, a kind of order, to confirm myself the text is poetry. I want to have a system then disrupt it. When the ruins work, they arrive at you like a big or small fireworks, which indeed, are some pure dazzling glories. I've seen poems like that from my cohort, "Night" by Karisma Price, “Ceremony” by Omotara James, “Such As” by Wo Chan, and more.

But mine is often some failed trial out of another intention. A crippled sestina, a little pond did not become a mirror, an export-intended conversation sold at home. "We are gonna fuck up anyway, so don't be afraid to try,” Bob Currie once told us in a literary group, a lifelong-like thing prolonged from an MFA class, where we still meet up weekly to make up different constraints and games to battle with the same nothingness throughout the pandemic. Groping through video essays, choreography, fire, and ashes, our conversations always lope back to poetry. About poetry structure, I am still practicing for a leap that has a super-natural pause.

You're also a visual artist. What is the process for the art you make, like your collages?

Yes, a visual artist if the definition of visual artist includes being a flaneur. No, French is too fancy. In Chinese, we have this word 街头混混（Jiē tóu hùn hùn), meaning jobless randomizer who dawdles on the street, a phrase your relatives used to scare you: they said if you don't work hard, you will become one of them.

Unfortunately, that's me, currently. When I am not taking notes of overheard words on subways, I am probably taking pictures and videos of random things on the street. Lost gloves, broken TVs and toys next to the trash can, the old man in Washington Square Park who can summon hundreds of pigeons, and people dressing like clowns and Batman on the subway; they have stored the most crystal and vulnerable memory of this truly messy but magic city.

I love wandering the streets. Sometimes I walk all the way from the Upper East Side to Soho tracking a bus routine, or jump onto a random train and choosing the slowest way to get back home. I used to intern as a real estate assistant, only because that job allowed me to visit new neighborhoods and peep into strangers' houses. Sometimes I would make drawings on my iPad echoing the pictures I took, or reorganize the video clips, composing a poem as the subtitle.

The internal connection of random objects is cheerful. I don't know what I am going to write, and what my project is about, but once these resources are documented in my devices, they are already something with a spirit. It will still take a long time to work on the coherency and to find the best medium though. That's also why my work bounces among photography, painting, video, and performance, I am testing and not satisfied and changing.

At other times, work ideas pop up from the daily chatter with friends. I've worked on several projects with my dear friend Jinjin Xu, our different reactions to the same object often leading to some doomed but hilarious situation, making us want to think deeper and work something out of it. I love collaborating with artists in other mediums; they often encourage me to not rely just on page-based publications. I can place poetry in wider, wilder fields, like ASMR therapy, video games, interactive performances, and more.

Recently the artists Dyan Jong and Lucy Yao, whom I met from the Interactive Telecommunications Camp, just crafted an online audio-visual lighting installation around my poems, which was a truly meditative experience. As a person who always feels a fear of reading poems in public, I realized there are actually other ways to release our text. The first thing is to jump out from the small poet’s circles and talk to people from other fields.

How do you decide when something should take the form of writing or visual art?

When I get stuck in writing I move to visual art, and vice versa. In the end, they often entangle together.

As someone who enjoys fashion, what is your relationship to choosing what to wear, and the objects you choose?

My mum runs clothing stores for a living and her apartment back in China is full of dressing mirrors. I guess the world I was raised in was literally a fitting room. Though I am definitely not one of those people who have a perfect body shape and appearance and can always appear confident. I am the opposite. I feel scared of reflection, gazing, and expectation, from peers, males, westerners, and myself. But clothing can be a true weapon, which can empower me to resist all the expectations and self-expectations. Once I dress up in something I get a new persona, I feel safe. I see dressing as a way of erasing and camouflaging rather than showcasing.

And in this case, New York City is the best place for fashion or anti-fashion; people have the freedom to release the monsters from their bodies. My friend once commented that sometimes I dress like an ancient Chinese mushroom. I don't disagree: when I think of myself as a walking mushroom I feel good and the chaos of the world matters less to me.

What are some of your inspirations?

Ólafur Elíasson’s lighting installations, Zhang Kechun's photography. Shuji Terayama’s stage design. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's films. Performances from Meredith Monk, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Dimitris Papaioannou. Music from Cafe OTO in London. Books by ancient Sichuanese writer Zhang Dai, especially The Night Ferry, an imaginative mock encyclopedia I can read forever. Friend's Venmo entries, human relationships are after all money relationships. Bios in FB subletting advertisements. Thrift stores, junk shops, Taobao. Animal Crossing. Video game reviews. Textile books. Japanese restaurants. Chinese costume dramas. Anyway, a mix of experimental and cheesy things.

And a little note about the poem “Clip,” previously published on Yes Poetry: That was from my roommate, she complained to me about the guy she was talking to on the dating app, then handed me her phone and asked me to help her continue the conversation. It then became a role play and literary game for me. I discovered a visual artist called Huang Anlan also did a similar kind of social engaging work, in which she creates this persona of a submissive Japanese high school girl on Tinder and makes fun of white men who have yellow fever.

Describe an ideal day for you (if there were no limitations).

A sleeping day? No, it must be a guilty day. I promise Catherine Barnett I would write at least 3 pages a day. Then an ideal day must be like the day I wrote 10 pages and finished replying to all the emails. It must feel so relieved and cheerful like a Friday night, then I could take off my official face and relax back in bed writing nonsense that matters to no one but my best friend and life-long collaborator Sonja Bjelic.

Jiaoyang Li is a poet and interdisciplinary artist currently based in New York. Her literary work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review of Books' China Channel, Blackbox Manifold, 3:AM, Datableedzine, Harana Poetry, Chinese News Magazine, Spittoon Magazine, Enclave Poetry, Voice and Verse poetry magazine, and others. Her interdisciplinary practices have been supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts, New York Live Arts Center, The Immigrants Artist Biennial, Performa Biennial, Artyard Center, Surface Gallery, and others. She serves as the co-founder of interdisciplinary poetic practice journal 叵CLIP (https://cclliipp.com/). Find more about her at www.jiaoyangli-textile.com

Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York. They are the author of Sirs & Madams, The Gods Are Dead, Marys of the Sea, Sexting Ghosts, Xenos, No(body), #Survivor: A Photo Series (forthcoming), and A Love Story (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021). They are the editor of A Shadow Map: Writing by Survivors of Sexual Assault and the illustrator of Dead Tongue (Yes Poetry, 2020). They received their MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and Joanna is the founder of Yes Poetry and the senior managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine.