Gillian Jin

Introduction

Gillian left home for college, spending four years in Beijing, four years in Hong Kong, and currently her fifth year in Taiwan. After moving ten times in the span of ten years, she now lives with her cat from Taitung in Taipei. Gillian's creative path has unfolded alongside her path of migration, spanning from literature to journalism. She has won the Excellence Journalism Award and the SOPA Award. Gillian has since shifted to ethnographic writing in anthropology, where she is currently leaning towards multi-media and multi-carrier creations.

Resident planning

"She has been working very hard to stave off decay, but still struggles to escape her fate."—Blue Island (A Hong Kong documentary) In 2022, Gillian began the project "Healing Dialogue: Translating Image into Poetry". Taking the homophony of "dialogue" (duìhuà) and "pictures" (huà), Gillian will write poetry in response to paintings created by three displaced individuals, thus conducting cross-media dialogue between words and paintings. Two of the three individuals will be invited to hold collaborative workshops, where they will attempt to explore the possibilities of the creative process as a means to heal the displaced body. The three painters and friends have each experienced the Hong Kong of the 1970s, 1990s, 2000s, and today. They have each recorded the changing world and its people through graffiti, painting, meditation, and picture diaries. Feng Zi (風籽) began a series of diary sketches entitled SQUARE THOUGHTs in 2015, using black and white dots, lines, and shapes in their response to the changes in Hong Kong since 2014. ASTROJOKE creates graffiti rich in color and emotional tension. With a provocative attitude, they depict the quest to find love in the confusion of youth under the current zeitgeist. The third artist, EDO, depicts the interactions between a person and a cat, recording their inner world of alternating dreams and reality on their journey away from home. My residency project will consist of creating three sets of 10 to 14 poems (see the calligrams in the chapter pages of Letters of Displacement 《流離之書》) within two weeks in response to their paintings, and give the unnamed paintings shared titles with the poems. Through the cross-media dialogue of text and images, I hope to connect with several creators to express and translate the emotions and life stories we share, and to use art as a meandering medium to transform trauma caused by political violence, separation, and fracturing into an "impossible performance," illuminating a small piece of the path towards healing. "In the telling, the trauma story becomes a testimony.... as a ritual of healing.... Through their storytelling, [they] 'regain the world they have lost.'"— Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery