Jewellery is a Poem

中文版 - Chinese version      

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Yitong Zhang

Preface by curator YDMD Studio:
The relationship between poetry and visual art has long been discussed. For instance, Dongpo Su has once praised Mojie Wang, ‘while tasting Mojie’s poems, there are paintings in the poems; when observing Mojie’s paintings, there are poems in paintings.’ Therefore, could we consider that poems and paintings are homogeneous?
 
Benedetto Croce believed that the transformation from mental intuition to taste-saturated imagery is regarded as the completion of a piece of work. It could be poetry, painting, or any other art form. However, Guangqian Zhu has reflected on Croce’s ‘Expression theory of art’, he suggested that language and thought are coherent and generated at the same time. According to Guangqian Zhu’s point of view, when we regard jewellery or poetry as the ‘language’ of expressing concepts, on the contrary, the media itself will also influence the generation of ideas, that is, every work is the result of the dialogue among artistic concepts, emotion and thought, and media. Then, the next question is, although the media are not completely homogeneous, will they interact with each other?
 
As a sort of intimate object, jewellery is born with the identity and emotion of the wearers. People often describe handicraft as a series of words related to human intelligence, such as ‘temperature’, ‘emotion’, ‘thought’, and ‘ritual’. In the meanwhile, whether Moruo Guo said that, ‘the essence of poetry is dedicated to lyricism’, William Wordsworth believed that, ‘poetry is the natural expression of strong emotions’, or Susanne Langer said that, ‘poetry is the symbolic form of emotions’, poetry seems to have a ‘translucent’ connection with human emotions. This resonance inspired this transboundary exhibition, to explore an intertextual method of creation between poetry and jewellery.
 
Poet Eliot has written that in art forms, the way of expressing emotions can only be realized through looking for an ‘objective counterpart’. In other words, a collection of objects, a scene, and a series of events could form an equation of a certain emotion. For this end, we invite jewellery artist Yitong Zhang to make two rings first, presenting the traditional and digital creation process respectively, which are provided to poets as a kind of stereoscopic inspiration. After the invited poets compose the poems, the jewellery artist then recreates based on the poems.
 
Ludwig Wittgenstein found that what a word refers to is difficult to generalize with a common feature. The more real situation is that there are some similarities based on diverse properties between them, just like a family is related by blood ties. This ‘blood relationship’ between the meaning of words is primarily because language is alive and semantics is not defined. It is open, fluid, and constantly activated, and extended in use. Consequently, as far as contemporary jewellery is concerned, how could it be continuously stimulated but still maintain this ‘family similarity’ instead of ‘premature advancement’? Perhaps these poems will offer a lot of unexpected but reasonable answers, at the same time, stimulate contemporary jewellers’ thinking.
 
Amazing Words Bookstore is such an appropriate experimental venue! Numerous exquisite texts linger there. We quietly stuffed the poems of this exhibition into the space composed of words. Every audience needs to ‘find’ the sound of jewellery in the melody. We hope everyone will come to this different kind of "cross-border experiment". Here, we listen to the free talk of poetry and jewellery and the dialogue between emotion and language.


Poet: Chunshu, Nanren, Qizi, Shengxing, Weihuan, Xidu Heshang

> Click here to read all poems inspired by artist's ring work (Chinese and English translation)