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Poet-critic and art curator Mai Mang organized the exhibition Wang Mansheng: From Silk Road to Hudson River at Connecticut College in early 2020. It presents Chinese artist Wang Mansheng's journey over the past thirty years finding his roots and searching for new origins across two continents: from the Silk Road where he first felt inspired by traditional literati art as well as Buddhist art to the Hudson River Valley where he has resided since 1998 and has explored new themes such as freedom and the use of the \"useless\" through new mediums. More importantly, this exhibition also gives us an opportunity to delve into some of the fascinating dilemmas with which Wang has wrestled along the journey of his growth and evolution as an artist. Ultimately, Wang proclaims a quiet yet persistent stance of carving out an independent space for himself and his art, transcending contemporary chaos and strife.

As a cofounder of the PRC’s first unofficial literary journal Jintian (Today) in 1978, Mang Ke was born in 1950. He began writing poetry as a sentdown youth in Baiyangdian, rural Hebei province, during the Cultural Revolution. One of the progenitors of what would later be called Obscure or “Misty\" poetry, his spare, impressionistic poems were among the first to break free of the imposed discourse of Maoism towards an imagebased literary style that left space for both expression and interpretation. He currently makes his living as an abstract painter and lives in Songzhuang, an artists’ colony on the outskirts of Beijing.

Poet-critic and art curator Mai Mang curated a solo show Wang Ai: Flying Over Ancient Landscapes at Connecticut College in 2017 and wrote this exhibition article introducing Chinese artist Wang Ai to his new audience for the first time in North America. Simultaneously possessing a highly experimental and self-reflective sensibility and also an intuitive and indigenous upbringing, Wang considers himself a contemporary artist exploring boundaries of tradition and modernity. In 2008, inspired by the Northern Song landscape painter Fan Kuan's masterpiece Travelers among Mountains and Streams, Wang decided to experiment on paper, re-engaging the great Chinese landscape painting tradition and searching for a new style and direction, which resulted in his ongoing series Flying Over Ancient Landscapes (2009-present). Often calling his style \"polyphonic,\" Wang weaves a labyrinthine universe of ancient landscapes, animals, and scriptural texts, which are juxtaposed with contemporary elements and demonstrate the fascinating and captivating contradictions embedded in Wang's identity as an artist. While presenting the dark, the obscure, the invisible, and the unsayable, Wang's art is traditional and contemporary, humanistic and spiritual. Once placed in a context of the new millennium where violence and confusion can be rampantly abstract yet inescapable, the seemingly decorative or stylistic elements in his art will bring out new surprises. They will reveal their poignant edges, and stir resonance across the borders of nation-state, culture, and language.

Poet-critic and art curator Mai Mang curated a solo show Wang Ai: Flying Over Ancient Landscapes at Connecticut College in 2017 and wrote this exhibition article introducing Chinese artist Wang Ai to his new audience for the first time in North America. Simultaneously possessing a highly experimental and self-reflective sensibility and also an intuitive and indigenous upbringing, Wang considers himself a contemporary artist exploring boundaries of tradition and modernity. In 2008, inspired by the Northern Song landscape painter Fan Kuan's masterpiece Travelers among Mountains and Streams, Wang decided to experiment on paper, re-engaging the great Chinese landscape painting tradition and searching for a new style and direction, which resulted in his ongoing series Flying Over Ancient Landscapes (2009-present). Often calling his style \"polyphonic,\" Wang weaves a labyrinthine universe of ancient landscapes, animals, and scriptural texts, which are juxtaposed with contemporary elements and demonstrate the fascinating and captivating contradictions embedded in Wang's identity as an artist. While presenting the dark, the obscure, the invisible, and the unsayable, Wang's art is traditional and contemporary, humanistic and spiritual. Once placed in a context of the new millennium where violence and confusion can be rampantly abstract yet inescapable, the seemingly decorative or stylistic elements in his art will bring out new surprises. They will reveal their poignant edges, and stir resonance across the borders of nation-state, culture, and language.

This article introduces contemporary Chinese artist Cai Dongdong, who started as a documentary photographer. He soon moved to experiments of conceptual or meta-photography that aim to expose the paradoxical, often deceiving and violent origins of photography. Of particular note is Cai's recent and ongoing series of \"salvaged\" photographs from 2014 on, including works such as Fountain and Off Target, in which Cai ingeniously performs an individual as well as public ritual of \"salvaging\"-at once referencing and reacting to China's past history and current social reality, and also suggesting the newly found source of his own, future-oriented, creative inspirations. In the end, Cai offers a most powerful way of deconstructing the ideological darkroom, or Plato's Cave, that is universal and ever-present across borders, not only specific to China or its Maoist past, and finds his own \"re-entrance\" into contemporary Chinese history and art.

In this essay, poet-critic Mai Mang explores the work of ethnic minority poet Jidi Majia in relation to his unique inheritance of Yi linguistic, cultural, and cosmological elements to challenge the often over-simplified notion of a uniform Chineseness in Chinese literature. Through the work of this poet and others writing out of China's many ethnic minority communities, readers can begin to gain a far more inclusive understanding of what Chinese poetry is, and they will also be able to see the cosmopolitan conversations taking place between minority poets and indigenous writers around the world.

For the Tujia poet Mai Mang, rivers connect us to the past and present, traversing borders and revealing a fundamental life-giving force running through his being. This talk, translated by the author from the original Chinese, was presented at the 2012 World Indigenous Poets Tent Roundtable Forum in Qinghai, China, and is an homage to his indigenous roots and the rivers that have nourished them.

Duo Duo returned to China in 2004 to assume a professorship at Hainan University. Since his return, he has been steadily \"rediscovered\" by a younger generation of Chinese writers and poets.