Editor’s note: Matt Turner recently read Anthony Tao’s new poetry collection, We Met in Beijing, and went to a reading of his in New York. He wrote a short “consideration” about it all and we are pleased to present it, below.
Anthony Tao at Sunset Bar:
A Consideration
by Matt Turner
Anthony Tao, We Met in Beijing, Beijing: Golden Weasel Publishing, 2024. 114 pgs.
Dual strands of incense smoke curled into ringlets, then billowed out further until merging and reshaping as a funnel, then as a single coil, and then other, vaguer shapes. I watched the reflection of the smoke playing out over the mirror laid out on the floor, but in the dim room I saw it as a mediating layer of gauze. Eventually, the stick of incense had burnt down to nothing but an orange speck, the size of the corner of an eye, and then, there was nothing at all there. The glare of the projector, playing a live CNN broadcast, shining off the mirror, glared in my line of sight.[1] And then I walked down the hall to the larger gallery, where I stared at hoops of coloured light projected on the walls.[2] The light glided over and maybe through the circular mobiles hanging from the ceiling, and I wondered—if I could only reach, would the light project color over my hand, or did the limit of specifically this wall create an admixture, something like creosote that preserved the action of colour, which travelled, unseen, through the air. On my hand it might, then, roll off like beads of water.
Recently, I read an essay[3] by the art critic Kate Brown. She coined “hypersentimentalism” to describe the recent dominant tendency in American visual arts toward local figuration—that is, pictures of people you know. On the surface the paintings are portraits and ensemble scenes, but the more one recognises—the more people one recognises—the deeper the signification of the depicted in the painting, and the more you become complicit in the content. The content is less what it depicts than what you know it depicts; you are taking part. In one sense, hypersentimental paintings are merely figurative; in another sense, they are constellations of relationships, personalities and, in the end, first order content (whereby the preliminary ground for seeing the painting is a perceived personal knowledge of those relationships and personalities that are implied).
Hypersentimental painting is not really new—and much poetry also lives in the neighbourhood of the hypersentimental. Paintings of the “New York School”, notably by Jane Freilicher and Larry Rivers, can be seen as hypersentimental. Some of the poetry of later generations of the same group can easily be read in the same light, especially the work of Eileen Myles. Friends and relationships are depicted, and one’s enjoyment of the poetry, as well as one’s sense of where one is situated in the context of that work, depends on how much one recognises in the paintings or poems. The way one feels towards the subject of the work largely validates the work as well as the viewer. Key to this is a degree of realism (figuration, or being able to comfortably identify what is being spoken of), and that there is iconographic clarity—any incoherence must be subsumed into the image of the whole. For poetry, importantly, the reader should be able to take part in what the “speaker” of the poem depicts—meaning what they feel.
It’s helpful to consider that Brown has also said[4] that the recent turn to the hypersentimental in painting was prompted by a “search for authentic, cool people”, in opposition to slick art-world personalities. Here it resembles much poetry, which also stakes much on being authentic and cool (as opposed to slick fiction personalities), and whose cultivation of individual sensibility is most often worn on a threadbare sleeve.
A consideration:
I drove to Ridgewood, Queens, to see a poetry reading by Anthony Tao, whom I’d met a few months earlier at his bar, the Golden Weasel, in Beijing. A former sports reporter, he stayed on in Beijing after an assignment there, hosting literary events and reading his poetry around town. Eventually he opened his bar, a small space in one of the old parts of the city, where he continues to host poetry readings. Both his bar and his poetry exist in the never-ending twilight space of Beijing’s expat community—slim novels like Harold Acton’s Peonies and Ponies, set in Beijing, satirise it well, its hustlers and aesthetes, and its opportunists. Anthony’s writing is aware of this context and exploits it. Like many Americans who have lived long-term in China, he comes across as simultaneously outgoing and reserved. It’s as if he has visibly signed that he is sitting on a store of crucial knowledge that he is not about to let go of. The reading he took part in consisted mostly of hypersentimental performances of personal disclosure—what one did, exactly, and with whom (people that the audience seemed to know). The reading stage, in the basement space of a very small bar, further contributed to the sense of intimacy. Because of this, you expected Anthony to disclose his secret knowledge—and that this knowledge would confirm what you expected (establish your social experience through recognised relationships) and hoped for (the establishment of further experiences).
A couple of weeks before the reading, Anthony sent me his new book, We Met in Beijing. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a writer working outside of the two or three global cultural metropoles, he makes full use of the vocabulary of American popular culture—writing of “I Want It That Way”, “Empire State of Mind”, or a Celine Dion (maybe it was Mariah Carey?) reference that immediately connected with the audience. At the reading I expected hemispheric indifference to poems about Beijing, but the audience seemed to take part in his earnest narration. (At the reading, the international cultural references mainly stayed at the level of pop music and drinks ordered. In the book, occasionally other, literary, references pop up, including “Ozymandias”, the strategist Zhuge Liang, and Sax Rohmer.)
The most prominent feature of We Met in Beijing is the thrill of living in Beijing. However, at the reading, his personal emotion was foregrounded (conveyed through family memory or through collective action events, like dancing at a nightclub). Specifics—a mention of June 4th, for instance—were there, but were easy to gloss over in the real time of the reading. He stood on stage, his crisp tenor voice demanding an attention that other readers achieved with force of volume, and possibly this—along with amplifying emotional connections that would implicate the audience as part of an international cognoscenti—also contributed to a very successful reading.
From there, “off we went through the coarse aesthetics” of Beijing, “wearing like dandruff/ the flakes of prior lives”. As long as one could vicariously participate in the context, the poems pointed toward a hidden collective experience hidden behind the right-hand path. The scripted experiential orthodoxy of poetry readings gave way to a heterodox experience that instructed another kind of celebratory, lived experience, where the confirmation of new social connections would take place. Following this other path, one could imagine waking up in Beijing. For a moment universal became singular, and specific became universal—or at least something as large as a megacity. We were all “hypersentimental”.
On the subway late one night after getting drinks, stuck in a car full of screaming French teenagers, I wondered how many lifetimes I would cycle through until I had had my fill. Surely, the desire to get one’s fill is expended similarly to the way that energy is expended, and just as one goes to sleep after too much activity, one passes out of samsara when one’s desire has been used up. Much of America exists in a landscape bereft of desire—but even in the most forlorn suburb a kind of acute anger at the state, at the self, and anxiety about the present bubbles over. Maybe that’s why the poetry reading was so successful—desire one didn’t know one had could be realised, breathing new life into the otherwise morbid genre of the poetry reading. But then the teenagers began to chant something. I tried to bury myself in my jacket collar but remembered I wasn’t wearing a jacket. I pulled out my phone during one of the subway’s brief intervals of cellular access, checked Facebook, and saw news that Marian Zazeela had just passed away. Then the ambient light rolled off my hand like beads of water. The sound of the teenagers’ chanting was an objective fact; the space of the car expanded; I could move around freely. The door opened to the station at 59th Street, and a few of us, fixated on interior tasks, passed through the image of the open door. Long live abstraction.
[1] Jung Hee Choi, “Color (CNN/Twitch): live realization v.2,” 2023, mixed media installation, New York, Dream House.
[2] Marian Zazeela, “Imagic Light,” 2003, mixed media installation, New York, Dream House.
[3] Kate Brown, “How a New Wave of ‘Hypersentimental’ Portraiture is Serving Up Painting for the Age of Vibe Shifts and Nano-Influencers”, news.artnet.com, Artnet, June 8 2023, https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/hypersentimentalism-painting-2315575.
[4] Kate Brown, interview with Ben Davis, The Art Angle Podcast, podcast audio, June 8, 2023, https://news.artnet.com/multimedia/the-art-angle-podcast-what-is-hypersentimentalism-2316928.
How to cite: Turner, Matt. “Anthony Tao at Sunset Bar: A Consideration.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 29 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/29/anthony-tao/.
Matt Turner is a writer and translator based in New York City. Recent publications include the poetry collection Slab Phases (BlazeVox, 2022) and the prose chapbooks City/Anti-City (Vitamin, 2022) and Be Your Dog (The Economy, 2022). He is the translator of Lu Xun, and co-translator of Yan Jun, Ou Ning, Wan Xia and others. [All contributions by Matt Turner.]
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