Phoenix - Softcover

Phoenix is a bilingual edition of a poem commissioned by Xu Bing's studio to accompany his installation--Phoenix. Xu Bing spent two years creating this work, which features two monumental birds fabricated entirely from materials harvested from construction sites in urban China, including demolition debris, steel beams, tools, and remnants of daily lives. The Phoenix will move to New York City after its current run at MASS MoCA. This edition includes over two dozen color photographs of the Phoenix interspersed between the long poem. Ouyang Jianghe is one of mainland China's most established poets. Zephyr published his first book in English translation, Doubled Shadows.

Xu Bing: Perhaps the best known contemporary Chinese artist, Xu Bing serves as the vice-president of the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. He is most known for his printmaking skills and installations, as well as his creative artistic use of language. Ouyang Jianghe: Critics consider Ouyang Jianghe's poetry some of the most challenging avant-garde verse written in China over the past few decades; his poems, which have the intricate, sculpted quality of fugues, are concerned with dissecting the layers of meaning which underlie everyday objects and notions like "doubled shadows." He is a prominent art critic and chief editor of the literary magazine Jintian; he lives in Beijing. Austin Woerner: a Chinese-English literary translator; his current projects include a collection of poetry, Doubled Shadows, by Ouyang Jianghe, and a novel, Witching Vale, by the exile writer Su Wei. He graduated from Yale University in 2008 with a BA in East Asian Studies. In September 2009 he took part in a joint residency with Ouyang at the Vermont Studio Center, where they were the first writer-translator pair in the Literature in Translation Program.