I was talking to my parents on the phone the other day. I was curious as to whether the solar terms still hold much sway in Hong Kong.

Both the Chinese and the Japanese have alternative or old names for each month. These are infinitely more poetic than ‘first month’, ‘second month’, ‘third month’ etc that are in use. Remembering the order of the months is not a matter of basic numeracy, but about paying attention to your surroundings.

I now have a definite structure for this project. Inspired by Liza Dalby’s usage of the Chinese almanac in her book, East wind melts the ice: a memoir through the seasons, I too decided to utilise this ancient calendar.

Autumn is my proposed project for the Australia Council for the Arts’ Tokyo Studio Residency. It takes an experimental form: an interactive calendar, a chronicle of audiovisual prose poems, an online multimedia journal of sorts, that uses materials at hand (e.g. ephemerals, facsimiles of objects, images, video footage collected from the local environment) to create […]