by
Janine Harrison
Wang Ping will read work and install Kinship of Rivers
Flags for a temporary exhibit as part of the 2015 Steel Pen Creative Writers’
Conference Welcome. Indiana Writers’
Consortium has partnered with Indiana University Northwest, who will host the
event on October 9th, at 8 PM, in the Gallery of Contemporary
Art.
Wang Ping teaches creative writing at Macalester College,
in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Most recently, Wang collaborated with British
filmmaker Isaac Julien on Ten Thousand
Waves, a film installation that premiered in London, about illegal Chinese
immigration. She then published a poetry collection of the same title (Wings
Press, 2014).
Wang moved from China to the US in 1986. She has also published American Visa (short stories, 1994), Foreign Devil (novel, 1996), Of
Flesh and Spirit (poetry, 1998), The
Magic Whip (poetry, 2003), The Last
Communist Virgin (stories, 2007), and All
Roads to Joy: Memories along the Yangtze (2012), all from Coffee House
Press. She co-translated and edited the
anthology New Generation: Poetry from
China Today (Hanging Loose Press, 1999) as well as co-translated the
anthology Flash Cards: Poems by Yu Jian,
(Zephyr Press, 2010) with Ron Padgett. Aching
for Beauty: Footbinding in China (University of Minnesota Press, 2000) won
the Eugene Kayden Award for the Best Book in Humanities, and in 2002, Random
House published the paperback edition. In addition, The Last Communist Virgin won the 2008 Minnesota Book Award and
Asian American Studies Award. Wang has
had two photography and multi-media exhibitions, "Behind the Gate: After
the Flooding of the Three Gorges” at the Janet Fine Art Gallery, Macalester
College, 2007, and “The Steel Dragon” at the Banfill-Lock Cultural Center,
2008. She has been the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the
Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council of the Arts and
the Minnesota State Arts Board and has received the Bush Artist Fellowship,
Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and the McKnight Artist Fellowship.
Wang Ping was born at the
mouth of the Yangtze River, Shanghai, and raised on an island in the East China
Sea that is fed by the Yangtze, which helps to explain why she spearheaded
Kinship of Rivers, a five-year interdisciplinary project designed to create
kinship among Yangtze and Mississippi communities as well as to foster
awareness, via art, literature, music, food, and river-flag installations, of
the rivers’ ecosystems. Thanks to visits
by Wang and other artists to river communities and schools, over 2,000 River
Flags, inspired by Tibetan prayer flags and made using hand-dyed fabric, have
been created by participants along the Yangtze and Mississippi, among other
rivers. Flags carry art, poetry, and
riverbank plant prints and travel widely between and within cultures, serving
as liaisons of peace, clean water, and harmony.
The goal is for the project to culminate in 2016 with 10,000 flags and a
documentary film. According to Wang
Ping, “We are water. It runs through us
like a river, like blood. It is our
blood, our mother.” Wang will also be
leading a flag and poetry workshop at the Steel Pen Creative Writers’
Conference on Saturday, October 10th.
The Steel Pen Welcome, which
is free, is open to conference participants and the IUN campus and local
community. Event information is as
follows:
October
9, 2015
8 PM
Gallery
of Contemporary Art
Savannah
Center
Indiana
University Northwest
3400
Broadway Avenue
Gary,
IN 46408
(IUN is
located approximately one block south of I-80 on the west side of Broadway
Ave. Park in the main lot.)
Light
refreshments will be served.
