A Note of Gratitude

It is with sadness, pride, and hope that I am announcing my step away from editorial work at The Shanghai Literary Review. 

I began discussing the possibilities for this transition in 2022 with some of the senior staff at TSLR. I had come to the realization that my leadership had taken the magazine as far as I could take it given the limits of my time, abilities, and vision. Though immensely proud of what TSLR has become, I felt the magazine desiring to grow and evolve beyond what it was. From a small initial team of four we quickly became a team of 22, with editors, freelancers, student assistants, and university funding. I knew that the magazine needed new ideas and new energy to sustain its trajectory. Everything I have put in place since those initial discussions has been to help the magazine succeed beyond me, one individual. I am so excited to see where TSLR goes in the future. 

Brian Haman, who has been with the magazine since 2017 will take on the role of Editor in Chief for Issue Eight and beyond. Brian has been and will continue to be editor of the book reviews and interviews sections. He has rich experience in management as a community activist, as well as a deep background in academia. He has shown steadfast dedication to the magazine over the years, and I have full confidence in his ability to lead the team. 

Peter Hagan, art dealer, writer, and student of architecture, will continue in his role of fiction editor, which he has maintained, superbly, since 2018.

I started TSLR in 2016 with a group of four friends, hoping to make a small mark on the international literary community. But I have learned and gained so much more from this project than I could have ever imagined. Thank you to everyone who has contributed, purchased, shared, stocked, hand sold, and loved our magazine. But most of all: thank you to my beloved TSLR team - your passion for art and literature, your generosity, your time, and your friendship have buoyed this project, and me, for the past eight years. 

-Juli Min 

Partnership Announcement: The Shanghai Literary Review & Duke Kunshan University Humanities Research Center

The Shanghai Literary Review and Duke Kunshan Humanities Research Center are pleased to announce our recent partnership.

Starting with TSLR Issue Seven, our organizations will work together in the planning and production of the magazine and to provide unique educational opportunities for students at DKU. 

The Shanghai Literary Review editorial standards remain the same, with the welcome addition of Carlos Rojas to our Editorial Board. Carlos Rojas is Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies; Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies; and Arts of the Moving Image at Duke University. Rojas is also a translator of Chinese literature.

TSLR will provide working apprenticeships for students at DKU related to the magazine and its events, as well as provide seminars on publishing. Professors Stephanie Anderson and Caio Yurgel will work closely with TSLR staff and DKU student assistants. 

Stephanie Anderson is an assistant professor of American literature at Duke Kunshan University. Her essays and poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, Posit, Rain Taxi, The Sink Review, The Tiny, and elsewhere. Her latest book of poetry is If You Love Error So Love Zero. You can read more of her work at octoberinapril.com.

Caio Yurgel is an assistant professor of humanities at Duke Kunshan University. His teaching and research are primarily concerned with literatures written in Chinese, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish, with a focus on comparative and interdisciplinary approaches. He is also an award-winning novelist. More at: caioyurgel.com

We look forward to enhancing both of our communities through this exciting partnership, and with these outstanding additions to our team.

Please note that TSLR will be moving our production schedule to fit an academic calendar year, and the reading of submissions for and publication of Issue Seven will be delayed by several months. Details will be announced separately.

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The Shanghai Literary Review is an annual journal of literature and art, founded in 2016, with an editorial team spread across China, Europe, and the US. To learn more about TSLR, please visit shanghailiterary.com

Duke Kunshan University Humanities Research Center promotes interdisciplinary research in the arts and humanities. To learn more about Duke Kunshan University Humanities Research Center, please visit sites.duke.edu/dkuhumanities

Interview: Behind the Circling Dolphins

By Yong-Yi Chiang

Kenny Ong studied philosophy and nonfiction writing at University of Pittsburgh and then went to Columbia University for an MFA in creative nonfiction. After receiving an MFA, he moved to Shanghai for three years, working in the travel and lifestyle media industry in various editorial positions. Amidst that work, he became the Nonfiction Editor for TSLR. In this interview, Ong talks about the process of creating TSLR’s logo and the inspiration behind it.

The Shanghai Literary Review logo

Yong-Yi Chiang: What was the process of designing the logo? How did it evolve?

Kenny Ong: TSLR has had two logos. For the logo used in first issue, we went with a Chinese seal theme, using an approximate English-Chinese translation of “The Shanghai Literary Review” to make up the seal’s characters. We liked how the Chinese seal is a sort of flag for Chinese culture and using it as a logo design would broadcast our relation to it.

That logo only made it into our first issue, though. We discovered that another literary organization had gone with the same motif, so we decided, after one discussion and design phase, to update our logo to the dolphin logo.

That logo only made it into our first issue, though. We discovered that another literary organization had gone with the same motif, so we decided, after one discussion and design phase, to update our logo to the dolphin logo.

Our Issue One designer, Marine Ng Cheong Sang, executed and iterated on all the ideas for both logos. She sent us, the editors, everything she came up with and we discussed what we liked, which ended up being the dolphin logo we have today.

YC: What inspired the design? Why include dolphins in the logo?

KO: For the second logo, I decided that a simple yet not abstract design would be ideal. The imagery of baiji dolphins came to mind one day. I thought about how the species, native to China, is as good as extinct, yet one or two are still spotted from time to time. The story of the baiji dolphins resonated with me and what we were doing. We were starting a literary journal in China, despite the low market viability of literary journals everywhere.

I shared all that with Juli Min (TSLR editor in chief), who liked it, and then Marine, who produced a couple iterations involving the circling dolphins, which I found to be a neat and clean, recognizable yet distinct, design element. I do recall the main difference among versions being that some involved the Chinese characters for TSLR, and some were just the English letters. We ultimately settled on using ‘“TSLR” as opposed to Chinese characters because we didn’t want to give the impression that we are a Chinese language or even bilingual literary journal. Yes, we publish translations from Chinese to English and include the original text, but in the end we only read submissions that are written in English.

YC: Why red for the logo?

KO: Choosing red for our first logo and the dolphin logo is a nod to the color’s significance in Chinese culture. While the color’s major cultural currency is fortune, I would say we adopted the color more to tie our journal to China and its geopolitical context, where China embodies and exudes the great influence of globalism on contemporary experience.

For more of Marine Ng Cheong Sang’s work, follow her on Instagram @Marineng and check out her website at https://marinengcheongsang.com.

Interview: Concrete China on View in Paris

Exhibition poster for Concrete China

In May 2018, The Shanghai Literary Review (TSLR) published a special edition book titled Concrete, which included essays and photographs on Chinese cities. This month, our visual editor Alex Gobin extended it into an exhibition called Concrete China—Réalités Urbaines en Chine Contemporaine. The show is being held at Raibaudi Wang Gallery and features the work of Zeng Han, Aurélien Maréchal, Luo Yongjin, Han Qian, and Deng Jiayun. Based in Paris, France, the gallery is run by Alexandre Raibaudi and Wang Xiaokun. TSLR's associate visual editor Jady Liu interviewed Gobin to tell us more about the show, which ran from May 5–19, 2019.

Special edition of TSLR, Concrete

Jady Liu: Tell us about yourself and the gallery.

Alex Gobin: I’m Alex Gobin, 31, from France. I studied history and art management applied to contemporary art. I spent a big part of my adult life in China, from 2012 to 2018. Now I live in Paris and I am the visual editor of The Shanghai Literary Review.

Raibaudi Wang Gallery, which was founded last year, is run by Alexandre Raibaudi and Wang Xiaokun. The gallery is in Place des Vosges in Paris, which is really a beautiful location. Although the gallery is young, Raibaudi and Wang are very actively engaged in the Paris contemporary art scene and they support very interesting French and Chinese artists. Some of them are emerging artists; others a lot more established, like Li Chevalier.

Opening of the exhibition Concrete China

JL: How did you get involved with the exhibition?

AG: I had it in the back of my mind to set up this exhibition when the artists and I were making the book Concrete with TSLR Editor in Chief Juli Min. I wanted to show the works of the photographers featured in the book and I initially thought it would be great to do an exhibition in Shanghai. It turned out that I moved back to France, so I looked around for a gallery to partner with for the event in Paris. I met Alexandre Raibaudi and Wang Xiaokun and from then we got the ball rolling. Other photographers were brought in along the way, which added strength to the project.

Block #11, Aurélien Maréchal. Photo courtesy of the artist.

JL: What’s the exhibition about?

AG: The exhibition features the work of five artists interested in China’s urban development. These artists, of course, are working with different perspectives, but there are very evident similarities between their works. They share this idea that today's massive development of China’s landscape, this great reshaping of the territory, is resulting in something very profound: a reshaping of the way that people experience reality. It’s redefining relationships, social life and culture at large.

The artists are trying to get a grip on this new reality and trying to find the right tools to talk about it, which to me is the most interesting part. Zeng Han talks about “hyperreality,” a concept he borrows from Baudrillard. It’s difficult to find appropriate words because we’re in uncharted territory and too deep within it to have any critical distance. I like to say that in photography, China is a futuristic genre. In a lot of photography from China today, you sense a situation that’s forthcoming, something that’s not fully born yet and at the same time you know it’s a situation that has no precedent.

Hyperreality China, Zeng Han. Photo courtesy of the artist.

JL: How does the show fit into the larger concerns of the gallery and your own curatorial curiosities?

AG: I spent a great deal of my time in China interviewing artists and writing about the Chinese art scene. And I came to realize that because China has been going through such extreme changes in the last decades, Chinese artists have important things to say about a wide range of questions, especially questions related to culture, collective structures and what it does to people to live in a context of accelerating modernity.

I met Luo Yongjin a few years back for an interview and I was particularly interested in what he had to say about these questions. I also came across the work of photographer Zhang Xiao (who isn’t in the exhibition), which was a bit of an epiphany for me: it made me understand a few things. Or rather, it made me realize there was a lot that needed to be understood about China’s contemporary development, not just to learn about China but to gain insight on what it is to be a human being today, to gain insight on what it is to be defined by culture in a time when there is uncertainty about what culture really means.

City Center on Qingming (detail), Luo Yongjin. Photo courtesy of the artist.

JL: The artists are quite diverse. In your mind, what tales do they tell in their own unique perspectives and how are you going to curate them?

AG: Of course the works of these artists have unique qualities, but I wouldn't say that this exhibition stands out for its diversity. It features photographers influenced by the same context, drawn to the same questions. Visually I think the works show a lot of connections too.

One exception is Han Qian. She's up to something different. With her, it's a reflection on time, and how to represent change. The blurry aspect of her photographs is a metaphor of our mental blur when one considers objects in relation to time. I think her work fits very well between Luo Yongjin, whose photo represents a landscape at different moments, in different seasons, as a way to assign temporality to it, and the works of Aurélien Maréchal, Zeng Han and Deng Jiayun that are also on the problematic of change, but from the angle of society. Han Qian brings an interesting extra layer to the exhibition.

Within Time 1, Han Qian. Photo courtesy of the artist.

JL: Can you talk a bit about the title Concrete China?

AG: It was Min’s idea to name the TSLR book Concrete. I thought of translating it into French but then the polysemy of the word would be lost, so I kept it in English for the exhibition, adding “China” because I wanted people to get an idea right away of what the exhibition is about. Also, I like the fact that the title is somewhat upfront, to resonate with the “upfrontness” of the works exhibited. Because basically, it’s an exhibition where you’re looking at walls, facades and blocks of concrete.

The word concrete is tied to a certain notion of objectivity. It makes you think of something very definite, very static and tangible. It’s not something you would normally say about a country, especially contemporary China. We say something is concrete because it’s objectively there for everyone to see. And of course, there is no ground for objectivity when you comment on a given society at a given time, because where would you even stand to make that claim? To name the exhibition Concrete China is, if not a paradox, at least a slight provocation.

Parc Central, Deng Jiayun. Photo courtesy of the artist.

JL: You were involved in publishing TSLR’s book Concrete. How does its focus compare to the focus of the exhibition?

AG: In the book, I wanted shifts in perspectives, close-ups and larger angles. Generally, I wanted different styles of photography to coexist. I had in mind that, by superimposition, a possible portrait of Chinese cities would emerge. With the exhibition, however, the accent is much more on large scales, landscapes and architecture. There is very little human presence and little depiction of daily life. For the exhibition, it was best to sharpen our focus.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Geoff Mino has contributed to the editorial and reporting for this article.

Below are some images from the opening of the exhibition Concrete China: Réalités Urbaines en Chine Contemporaine, which ran from May 5-19th 2019 at Raibaudi Wang Gallery in Paris.

Gallery owners Alexandre Raibaudi and Wang Xiaokun

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Jady Liu is the PR of Artexb.com and reseacher intern of media art at Center for Visual Studies Peking University. His articles and photos have been published on RadiiChina, SupChina, FTChinese and WSJ. He is also the founder of The Living Room, a project to connect creative minds and Beijing Hutong Team, a loose collective to document changes of historic alleyways in Beijing.

TSLR Book Club Meeting #15: Sunday, May 19

The Shanghai Literary Review’s Book Club will next meet on Sunday, May 19th at 6:30 p.m. We will be discussing two pieces by Victor Segalen: “Essay on Exoticism” and “Stèles. This month's discussion will be led by Ryan, an educator and writer currently working on a sequel to Stéphane Mallarmé’s Le Livre.

Images courtesy Amazon

About the Books (via Amazon):

Essay on Exoticism

Written over the course of fourteen years between 1904 and 1918, at the height of the age of imperialism, Essay on Exoticism encompasses Segalen’s attempts to define “true Exoticism.” This concept, he hoped, would not only replace nineteenth-century notions of exoticism that he considered tawdry and romantic, but also redirect his contemporaries’ propensity to reduce the exotic to the “colonial.” His critique envisions a mechanism that appreciates cultural difference—which it posits as an aesthetic and ontological value—rather than assimilating it: “Exoticism’s power is nothing other than the ability to conceive otherwise,” he writes. 

Segalen’s pioneering work on otherness anticipates and informs much of the current postcolonial critique of colonial discourse. As such Essay on Exoticism is essential reading for both cultural theorists or those with an interest in the politics of difference and diversity.

Stèles

With this highly original collection of prose poems in French and Chinese, Segalen invented a new genre—the "stèle-poem"—in imitation of the tall stone tablets with formal inscriptions that he saw in China. His wry persona declaims these inscriptions like an emperor struggling to command his personal empire, drawing from a vast range of Chinese texts to explore themes of friendship, love, desire, gender roles, violence, exoticism, otherness, and selfhood. The result is a linguistically and culturally hybrid modernist poetics that is often ironic and at times haunting. Segalen's bilingual masterwork is presented here fully translated, in the most extensively annotated critical edition ever produced. It includes unpublished manuscript material, newly identified sources, commentaries on the Chinese, and a facsimile of the original edition as printed in Beijing in 1914.

Date: Sunday, 6:30pm Location: Old China Hand Style, second floor OR first floor big table in back corner. Please connect with Juli via WeChat (ID Fialta) in order to be pulled into the Book Club chat group where we post more real-time updates, or if you need help finding the location/meeting table.

Directions: 374 Shaanxi Nan Lu, near Fuxing Zhong Lu, close to IAPM, metro stop Shaanxi Nan Lu

About the TSLR Book Club: TSLR hosts monthly group discussions about one fiction or nonfiction book related to Shanghai or China at large. Members of the book club choose and lead the books to be read. To learn more about The Shanghai Literary Review, please visit shanghailiterary.com.

Need further details about the book club or help getting a copy of the book/stories? Privately message Juli at fialta on WeChat.

Book Club FAQs:

Do I have to finish the book to attend a book club meeting? Whether you finished reading the book or not, we will still welcome you with open arms! We encourage everyone to read the book of the month, but some people come to meetings without fully completing it. We only require you to have an open mind when discussing the literary themes and Chinese history presented within the book.

Where can I buy these books? Because of the high cost of English books in China, we encourage everyone to buy an e-copy online. You can send a PM to fialta if you're having trouble finding a copy.

Do I need to RSVP?

Yes, for book club meetings please RSVP on our MeetUp page. This can help us better prepare for meetings and provide you the best literary experience possible.

Previously Read Books:

• Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage by László Krasznahorkai.

• Good Girl of Chinatown by Jenevieve Chang

• Years of Red Dust by Qiu Xiaolong

• Street of Eternal Happiness by Rob Schmitz

• Night in Shanghai by Nicole Mones

• China in Ten Words by Yu Hua

• Little Reunions by Eileen Chang    

• Border Town by Shen Congwen

• Factory Girls by Leslie Chang  

• The Family by Ba Jin  

• Remembering Shanghai by Claire Chao & Isabel Sun Chao

• From the Soil by Fei Xiaotong  

• selected short stories by Mu Shiying & Yiyun Li   

• The Invisibility Cloak by Ge Fei