Bess handpicked Mong Lan to serve as the Museum’s inaugural Visual Artist and Poet in Residence. Citing Mong Lan’s talents as both an actively exhibiting visual artist and a highly esteemed poet. The DMA brought Mong Lan from Tokyo to Dallas in February 2005 for a series of ongoing, community-based programs.
During the month-long residency, Mong Lan worked with the public on a daily basis, teaching a wide range of offerings including visual art, sketching in the galleries, and creative writing. Her students ranged from eighth grade art students at a nearby private exploratory arts middle school to ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth graders from Booker T. Washington High School, a local arts magnet for visual and performing arts that counts Erykah Badu and Norah T. Jones among its alumni. Over the course of the month, Mong Lan led drop-in poetry workshops for students from the greater Dallas metropolitan area, gave a gallery talk on spirituality and art, and even had the opportunity to teach a few classes of Argentine tango to talented high school dance classes. “I had never experienced anything like that before, teaching almost every discipline I knew, using every part of my brain. I had very little time to write; I did write a few poems, one which the museum asked me to write for them. And I did some calligraphy pieces, one of which I donated to the Museum. The Museum used me in the fullest possible way that they could as a teacher.” Her month-long residency culminated in “The World of Mong Lan,” a six-month exhibition of the artist’s work, showcasing two of Mong Lan’s large-scale painted works and her photography in the DMA’s galleries.
Following the residency, Mong Lan returned to her home in Tokyo, where she has lived since 2003. In Japan, Mong Lan teaches composition, literature, and creative writing to American service men and women at The University of Maryland University College’s headquarters at Yokota air force base.
Living in a foreign country seems to come naturally to Mong Lan who came with her family to the United States when she was five-years-old and spoke only Vietnamese. The family settled in Houston and over time Mong Lan learned English, though the Vietnamese language always remained in her ear. “There has always been, since the age of five, this constant bombardment of new sounds, new words and ideas I need to learn. There has always been this constant challenge, and I find this refreshing. Now, living in Japan, there is again, this bombardment of new sounds, a new challenge.”
When she’s not on the road, Mong Lan finds herself most able to sustain a regular writing practice. “When traveling, I write when I can, anywhere and on anything! I write best when at home—the regularity helps to invite the muse.” Mong Lan believes firmly in the idea that writing occurs alone and “in a room of one’s own.” Isolated from any mainstream poetry scenes or a literary community in Japan, Mong Lan’s development as a disciplined and innovative artist has been interesting to watch. Steadfast in her vision and her interests, Mong Lan’s latest projects take her into the realm of dance and performance. Her latest book project Milonga: A Seismology is an instructive collection of poems based on Argentine tango, a physically demanding discipline which has taken Mong Lan as far as Latin America to study this art form on five different occasions.
Though comparisons of her work have been drawn to Louise Gluck, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda and Elizabeth Bishop, Mong Lan resists connecting herself to any specific lineage. Admiring the works of Paz, Pound, Olson, Creeley, Lauterbach, Hejinian, Jane Miller and others, Moäng Lan believes that “whatever one reads will influence one, whether directly or indirectly.”
And indeed, even the most everyday of Mong Lan’s experiences and observations comes into play in her work. Several years ago, after watching a National Geographic program on conserving natural resources, Mong Lan wrote her poem sequence “Emerald World,” borrowing the phrase “nothing less but the world at stake” from the television program that had so engrossed her. “The phrase stuck with me, because of its importance.”
“Emerald World” is populated by disfigured men and scenes of violence ranging from butchered offal to an image of Serbs being slaughtered. The poem begins and ends significantly with the phrase “remember the future,” a preoccupation and theme that marks much of Mong Lan’s work in Why is the Edge Always Windy? “The future contains all possibilities. In the life we lead now, we must “remember the future,” so to speak. Consider the future; consider the consequences of our actions on future generations.” It is on this philosophical note that Mong Lan begins her second collection.
So what does the future hold for Mong Lan? Currently, she’s at work on a multi-media piece incorporating dance and video and assembling work for a possible monograph of her visual work. She has recently read her work in the United States, Japan, and Ubud (Bali) and is actively doing promotional readings for Why is the Edge Always Windy?
For an updated reading schedule and information on where you can catch Mong Lan in person, visit her Web site at www.monglan.com. Bio Text: Shin Yu Pai is the author of The Love Hotel Poems (Press Lorentz), Unnecessary Roughness (xPress(ed), Equivalence (La Alameda) and Ten Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers (Third Ear Books). Works on Paper (Convivio Bookworks), Selected Writings (Ahadada Books) and Nutritional Feed (Tupelo Press) are forthcoming.
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