Talk by Dr Nic Wong from University of Hong Kong
31 July 2026
3pm–4:15pm
Location: Coombs 3.369
Hosted by Gender Media & Cultural Studies at the ANU School of Culture, History & Language, this seminar asks: What does it mean to translate and interpret a poet’s work beyond its original intention?
Taiwanese poet Ling Yu’s poetry, spanning ten books, tackles artistic creation and observation in calligraphy, painting, and poetry, known as the “three perfections” (sanjue) in Chinese tradition. Her poetry’s homage to classical Chinese writers and artists from various dynastic ages demands attention to such references and syntheses of philosophies and fables into usable vignettes for life. But what if a poet’s work is not just defined by its sources of inspiration, but also its possibilities for reflection and transmission across traditions?
This talk relates Ling Yu’s poetics of landscape (shanshui) to materiality in Japanese “floating-world” (ukiyo-e) prints, objects in postwar French philosophy, and finally, presence in folk music and plywood drawings from contemporary Taiwan and Hong Kong.
About the speaker
Nicholas Y. H. Wong is Assistant Professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong and a CIW Visiting Fellow at ANU. He translated Daughters (Balestier Press, 2025) by the Taiwanese poet Ling Yu, recent winner of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature, and writes on labour, language, anticolonialism, and capitalism in Sinophone Southeast Asia, with attention to Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Indonesia.