Born in Singapore, Fiona Sze-Lorrain grew up in a hybrid of cultures in Europe, United States and Southeast Asia. An interdisciplinary artist whose works range from literary creation to music, theatre and curating, she writes frequently on contemporary and avant-garde art, from performance, cinema, poetry to photography and painting, as well as on gastronomy and architecture.
Sze-Lorrain writes and translates in English, French and Chinese. Her book of poetry, Water the Moon (Marick Press, 2010) is an Honorable Mention in the 2011 Eric Hoffer Book Award. New poetry translations includes Wind Says by Bai Hua and I Can Almost See the Clouds of Dust by Yu Xiang (Zephyr Press, 2012), prose and introduction of Hai Zi (Tupelo, 2012), a pocket edition of Low Key by Yu Xiang (The Chinese University Press, 2011) and Auxeméry's Mingus, méditations (Estepa Editions, 2011). With Gao Xingjian, she has co-authored Silhouette/Shadow (Contours, 2007). She has also worked on Ghérasim Luca, Samuel Beckett, Greta Knutson, Maurice Maeterlinck, Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag, Lan Lan, Yi Lu, Yang Jian and Yang Zi.
As a zheng concertist, she made her concert debut at age 9 in Singapore's Victoria Concert Hall. During her musical career, she has performed worldwide at venues including Lincoln Center, Merkins Concert Hall, Carnegie Hall, UNESCO House, Maison des cultures du monde, Zuiderspershuis Wereldculturen centrum, etc. Her CD, Une seule prise (In One Take), with Guo Gan (erhu) was released in Europe in 2010. Invited as a judge for international zheng competitions, she conducts masterclasses regularly, and performs for the Melody of Dialogue Among Civilisations at the UNESCO.
Together with Sally Molini and Karen Rigby, Sze-Lorrain is a founding editor of Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com), an international journal of literature, arts and culture. She also co-directs Vif éditions, an independent French publishing house in Paris.
Excerpted from Fiona Sze-Lorrain's conversation with editor Paul B. Roth:
PBR: How do you maintain such a strict sense of individuality, especially in terms of your perception, and yet allow it to freely define for you what you feel instead of falling under the influence of conventional reactions to things?
FS-L: A stone is all stones. Individuality is interiority. It is an inner strength that can expand outwards and root inwards. If you'd already evoked the hypothetical possibility -- implicitly a fear -- of "falling under the influence of conventional reactions to things," then in some way you must have already "fallen."
"Is it easier to satisfy a thousand desires, or to dominate one?" ask the Tibetans. I don't do anything specific or deliberate to "resist" conditions that "try to force me with temptations away from individuality," to borrow these words. Because in the first place I don't know what these temptations are. I can identify conventional reactions intuitively, but I don't quite need to do anything special to "chase them away." Rather, it is them that won't come near me. You don't need to fear or think of them if your so-called individuality is truly intact and stable. They won't "test" you if you don't intend to negotiate with them.
Does one need an ideology or a discipline of some sort in simply being yourself? Try avoiding the dichotomy of individuality versus something collective. To say that A is white doesn't mean it isn't black; it is just simply white. That said, a fine line is drawn between banality and convention. Being aware of their different territories is in itself an intriguing exercise. Kurt Vonnegut's Like Shaking Hands with God, for example, begins by quoting the eighteenth-century German dramatist, poet and critic, G. E. Lessing, "The greatest miracle is that true and genuine miracles seem to us banal everyday occurrences."
The following is excerpted from the selection of poems featured in this issue:
JAVANESE WAYANG
First, smoke. The elders grope
into the theater. Like
hidden bronze mirrors, midnight lanterns
glow. I don't ask
when the play begins. Ocher moths
over the whiteness
of the screen where trees clutch
the hungry rain, running
after wrong spirits. Someone is making
room for the wind. Inexplicable,
long fingers of light drag up a torn
hero. Self by self, he steals
away from his body. Gamelan enters:
the neighborly dark
roams. Watch the shadows, not
the puppets.
(p. 59: TBO Vol. 17; No. 2)
