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[sinetheta]

Reminder: we are accepting submissions to Issue #15 “MAGIC 魔“ until MARCH 31! What is magical to you? 

群魔乱舞: 。。。The demons and monsters dance in riotous revelry. Issue #15 “MAGIC 魔” is open for submissions.

In light of extenuating circumstances, Sine Theta Magazine will be accepting submissions to Issue #15 “MAGIC 魔“ until MARCH 31. Please visit our website for issue-specific details and submissions guidelines, respectively. Email us at [email protected] with any questions.

In a time of such crisis, it is important to remember that we are all members of communities—familial, academic, social, professional, neighboring, and otherwise. We must hold ourselves accountable to these communities by practicing social distancing measures appropriate to our own needs and abilities and by lending support to one another. Please avoid gatherings whenever possible—it is a terrible time for "last hurrahs” before lockdowns and shelter-in-place mandates take effect.

Amidst failing healthcare systems and daunting headlines, we believe that comprehensive healthcare should be a right—not a paid privilege. Recent escalations of anti-Asian racism (ranging from egregious COVID-19 misnomers such as “Kung Flu” and “Wuhan Virus” to overt physical violence enacted against Asian-appearing individuals) are vicious and categorically unacceptable. In policy and practice, community is first—we must protect each other.

The sinθ team wishes you and yours good health and safety, recognizing that this will be a traumatic few months for many for a plethora of reasons. Please reach out to those around you and help them seek shelter and love.

Take care, and we hope there is still room for a little magic in the world 🖤

Graphic designed by Julia Cheng. 

#call for submissions #call for poetry #chinese literature #chinese american literature #writers of the world #issue15

[sinetheta]

群魔乱舞: 。。。The demons and monsters dance in riotous revelry. Issue #15 “MAGIC 魔” is open for submissions.

In light of extenuating circumstances, Sine Theta Magazine will be accepting submissions to Issue #15 "MAGIC 魔“ until MARCH 31. Please visit our website for issue-specific details and submissions guidelines, respectively. Email us at [email protected] with any questions.

In a time of such crisis, it is important to remember that we are all members of communities—familial, academic, social, professional, neighboring, and otherwise. We must hold ourselves accountable to these communities by practicing social distancing measures appropriate to our own needs and abilities and by lending support to one another. Please avoid gatherings whenever possible—it is a terrible time for "last hurrahs" before lockdowns and shelter-in-place mandates take effect.

Amidst failing healthcare systems and daunting headlines, we believe that comprehensive healthcare should be a right—not a paid privilege. Recent escalations of anti-Asian racism (ranging from egregious COVID-19 misnomers such as "Kung Flu" and "Wuhan Virus" to overt physical violence enacted against Asian-appearing individuals) are vicious and categorically unacceptable. In policy and practice, community is first—we must protect each other.

The sinθ team wishes you and yours good health and safety, recognizing that this will be a traumatic few months for many for a plethora of reasons. Please reach out to those around you and help them seek shelter and love.

Take care, and we hope there is still room for a little magic in the world 🖤

Graphic designed by Julia Cheng. 

#open submissions #creative arts magazine #literary magazine #writers of tumblr #diaspora #issue15

[sinetheta]

🚨ISSUE #14 GIVEAWAY!🚨

To celebrate our first release of 2020—Issue #14 "PERFUME 香"—and the new Year of the Rat, we're kicking things off with a giveaway! Between January 30th to February 28th (ending 23:59 PST), purchasing 2 stickers from our RedBubble store will enter you in a raffle to win a free copy of Issue #14. Every additional sticker or merchandise purchase will count as an extra entry. Our favourites right now are staff contributor Juliette Wu's Zodiac Series: a great gift for the start of the Lunar New Year. To enter the competition: —Purchase your stickers from our RedBubble store and note your order number.

—Fill out this form with your order number and contact details—this will be used exclusively to get in touch with you if you have won the raffle!

—Like and reblog this post.

Raffle poster designed by Miki Wong.

#giveaway #stickers #stickers giveaway #chinese zodiac #chinese new #issue14

[sinetheta]

Happy Lunar New Year! Our 14th issue drops now—read on for more details!

Which are the aromas coaxing you to sleep at night? Which are the whiffs you track to a fight? Which are the trails you follow home?

Scents are often treated as slippery, effervescent—clouded gates to locked memories and the stuff polluting forgotten nightmares. Yet, in the midst of their poetic gauze, they can still be numbing and inundating. Sine Theta Magazine is pleased to introduce Issue #14 “PERFUME 香”: a heady, electrifying compendium of evocative artwork, steely poetry, and thoughtful conversation.

A slice of what this 43-paged print issue brings to the table: Kimberly Kiong’s photo series “Perfume” calls to mind the fleeting childhood “chouchou.” paul aster stone-tsao’s poem “Flatulence” tackles the visceral onslaught of spoors. Kwan Ann-Tan’s “Dirge of the Hungry Ghosts” encircles the special place food holds in memory and veneration. A record number of sinθ staff members dissect diaspora gatekeeping, class privilege, ethnic enclaves, and more in a heated editors’ conversation about the potential of a global Sino diasporic community.

Art director Elisabeth Siegel converses with performance artist Patty Chang, discussing Chang’s recent project involving ablution of a beached whale and her past work in China with minoritized figures and communities. Editor-in-chief Jiaqi Kang speaks with Seattle-based artist Stevie Shao on Instagram’s influence on creator communities and stepping out from school into “the real world.”

Issue #14 “PERFUME 香” can be purchased here.

The sinθ team is grateful to all the contributors, interviewees, and supporters who have made this issue possible. Follow us on Twitter (@sinethetamag) to be the first to hear of a special thank-you event coming up soon!

INSTAGRAM: instagram.com/sinethetamag

FACEBOOK | TWITTER | REDBUBBLE | MEDIUM | BLOG | WEBSITE

#Lunar New Year #chinese new year #year of the rat #creative arts #creation #issue14

[sinetheta]

THIS IS ISSUE #13. THE THEME IS “FORM 形.”

Hello, and thank you for your patience! We are excited to bring you our last issue of 2019: a brand-new 60-paged behemoth replete with the creative vitality and genius of 26 Sino diasporic creators around the world.

Issue #13 “FORM 形” is an exploration of all the strangest, best-loved mis- and dis-placed shapes and shapeshifters in our lives. 

In her latest editorial, editor-in-chief Jiaqi Kang muses on the common denominator of racism that often unites diasporic experiences and sinθ’s hopes for a deeper, schistic understanding of the rickety, amorphous, beautiful thing that is diasporic identity in her latest riveting editorial.

Art director Elisabeth Siegel had the opportunity to sit down with Yale’s Director of Undergraduate Studies for Architecture, Dr. Joyce Hsiang, to converse about Dr. Hsiang’s foundations and familial influences in the architectural field, her perceptions of “sustainability,” and anticipated future projects.

We feature egg-cellent works—poetry by Emily Lu and installation art by Sonia Cheng—alongside reflective and visceral fiction by Kevin Robert Fong, Allison Huang, K. K. Mai, and Lily Amelia Susman; luminous photography by Wenkai Wang, Chunfeng Lu, Isaac Sy and Kevin Lu; and a host of multi-formed, multidimensional written, visual, and installation creations by Sino diasporic creatives around the world.

From pottery and rice to papayas and poetry on Publix supermarkets, Issue #13 is rich with shapes and places both familiar and foreign, near and far. Read on for a journey through interiority and promise along the subway tracks and into burdened stomachs. We have cumulated works of all shapes, sizes, and distributions to bring you the wobbly, whimsical wonders that FORM embodies.

Grab a copy of Issue #13 “FORM 形” now!

WEB | FACEBOOK | INSTAGRAM | PINTEREST | REDBUBBLE

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

#diaspora #creative writing #creative arts #chinese #zine #issue13

[sinetheta]

Quaker Oats Mao. Zhang Hongtu (张宏图). 1987.

Zhang Hongtu (张宏图) is a Chinese artist who graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. In his art, Zhang often combines eastern and western ideas, styles, and techniques in his art. Zhang left China for the United States in the early 1980s and currently resides in New York. 

In Quaker Oats Mao, Zhang criticizes the ubiquity and power of Chairman Mao Zedong’s image in China by imposing iconic features of Mao, such as hair and clothing, onto the Quaker Oats man. This pop art of Zhang’s was not well received by neither China, where Mao’s image was almost sacred, nor the Quaker Oats company, which was anti-Communist. 

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

#zhang hongtu #quaker oats #mao zedong #chinese contemporary art #pop art #week 159 #eh

[sinetheta]

Liuyang River (浏阳河) by Jianzhong Wang (王建中). Performed by Yundi Li (李云迪).  

Born in 1933, Wang Jianzhong (王建中) was a Chinese pianist and composer. He began his piano studies at the age of ten, and in 1950 Wang was accepted into the Shanghai Conservatory of Music. Later, he became a professor at the Conservatory and also served as the composer-in-residence for the Central Philharmonic Orchestra.

Wang is known for combining traditional Chinese music and western classical music. This piece is no exception; it is based on the melodies of a Chinese folk song about the Liuyang River, located in Hunan, China. 

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

#liuyang river #wang jianzhong #li yundi #piano music #chinese folk music #week 159 #eh

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Foresight (预见). Jiang Pengyi (蒋鹏奕). Photography. 2019.

Jiang Pengyi is an artist based in Beijing, China. Their work exists mostly in the mediums of video and photography, and aim to create “a kind of surreal spectacle and delicate narration of the scene...to reveal the barriers and confusions of the individuals”.  Their work has won accolades such as the Aletti ArtVerona Prize for Photography, the Jury Grand Price from the Société Générale Chinese Art Awards and the Tierney Fellowship Award.

Foresights is an exhibition of photographic experiments that Jiang has been working on since 2014. Key to Foresights is the concept of “demeditation”, which Jiang deals with in this work by trying to get rid of external limitations within his photography - including cameras, lenses, and shooting techniques as much as the subjective identity of the artist or subject. 

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

#jiang pengyi #foresight #experimental photography #contemporary art #experimental chinese art #art #week 159 #hw

[sinetheta]

花自飄零水自流， 一種相思，兩處閒愁。 此情無計可消除， 才下眉頭，卻上心頭。 Flowers wither as water flows; one kind of longing, two places of sorrows.  These feelings cannot be washed away;  Just as they drop out of my eyebrows, they all surge towards my very heart.

Selection from A Sprig of Plum Blossom (一剪梅) by Li Qingzhao (李清照). Song dynasty. Translated by KS Vincent Poon in 2015. 

Li Qingzhao (李清照) is considered one of the greatest female poets in Chinese history. Born into a northern Song family of scholar-officials, Li Qingzhao was part of the small percentage of women at that time who received an education. 

Only around a hundred of Li’s poems remain, and most are in the Ci (詞) style. Her poems can be divided into two categories; her earlier works are similar to love poems, and her later works mostly voice her patriotism and anger about the Jurchen invasion, which forced her to flee from her home of the captial city Kaifeng. A Sprig of Plum Blossom is one of Li’s earlier works, and expresses the sorrows of being separated from one she loves. 

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

#li qingzhao #yi jian mei #plum blossom #chinese poetry #song dynasty #week 158 #eh

[sinetheta]

Exclusive Memory (獨家記憶) by Jordan Chan (陳小春). 2008.

Jordan Chan (陳小春) is a Hong Kong actor and singer. He was born in Guangdong province and moved to Hong Kong with his father at the age of 13. In 1985, he participated in a dance training programme hosted by TVB, and thus began his career in the entertainment industry. Since then, Jordan Chan has starred in many films and TV shows, and has released many albums as well.

Exclusive Memory was composed by Terry Chan, and its lyrics written by Yee Kar Yeung (易家揚). For Jordan Chan, the song evoked memories of his late mother who had just passed away a few years prior. He decided to make this song the title track of his 2008 album, and though the music video depicts a love story, the song nonetheless captures the importance of cherishing every moment spent with loved ones.

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

#chinese music #mandopop #jordan chan #chen xiaochun #hong kong singer #week 158 #eh

[sinetheta]

Litchi Girl (荔枝姑娘). Mao Chenyu (毛晨雨). Multi-media. 2018.

Mao Chenyu is an artist, documentary filmmaker, researcher and rice farmer born in Hunan and based in Shanghai, China. Trained in the study of inorganic non-metallic materials, Mao founds and runs Paddy Film Farm, a grassroots independent film studio and producer of organic rice and strong liquor. As such, he has spent over a decade producing “ethnographically inflected documentary work” in a village outside of Yueyang in Hunan. Mao has participated in multiple solo exhibitions and group exhibitions since 2015, and their films have won awards in the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival and Yunnan Multiculture Visual Festival.

Litchi Girl is Mao’s first solo exhibition and concerns the “contradictions between white and black spaces”. Mao uses green to resist both white and black discourses, mimicking the green screen technique of cinematic production. Viewers of the exhibition are left searching for the absent Litchi Girl throughout the exhibition, as the only footnote appears in the video Memory that Self Vanishes with 2/3 Speed of Light, which mentions that “In 1967 ‘Litchi Girl’ escaped a labor camp guarded by men, and jumped into the river. Several days later her body was found at the river mouth near Dongting Lake, her breasts already swollen”.

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

#mao chenyu #litchi girl #multimedia art #chinese art #chinese contemporary art #art #week 158 #hw

[sinetheta]

Saturday Fiction (兰心大剧院). dir Lou Ye (娄烨). 2019.

Lou Ye is a Chinese screenwriter-director based in Shanghai, China. Educated at the Beijing Film Academy, Lou has received international acclaim. for works such as Suzhou River (2003) and Summer Palace (2006). Touching on topics of Chinese identity and the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Lou’s work has been deemed controversy, with his first film Weekend Lover banned in its first two years of conception and the release of his film Summer Palace resulting in a five-year ban. Lou’s work is associated with the Sixth Generation film movement in China, known for its use of amateur filmmaking aesthetics and a more “individualistic, anti-romantic life view” with “attention to contemporary urban life, especially as affected by disorientation [and] rebellion”.

Saturday Fiction is a period drama set on Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1941. The movie centers around a famous film actress and spy Jean Yu on the search for her ex-husband (who is held by Japanese authorities) - as she features in the play “Saturday Fiction”. 

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#lou ye #saturday fiction #chinese arthouse #chinese film #arthouse cinema #film #week 158 #hw

[sinetheta]

Rock and Insects. Ju Lian (居廉). Ink and color on silk, circular fan leaves, mounted. 1896.

Part of the Lingnan School of Chinese painters in the late Qing Dynasty, Ju Lian (1828-1904) was a painter native to Panyu (番禺), now a district of Guangzhou. He would later come to mentor the brothers Gao Jianfu and Gao Qifeng, two artists who popularized the theme of incorporating modern, eclectic elements of Western painting into their traditional subjects — a theme that would later become a signature of the Lingnan School.

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#chinese art #chinese painting #ju lian #lingnan school #ink painting #week 158 #jz

[sinetheta]

诗者，志之所之也，在心为志，发言为诗，情动于中而形于言，言之不足，故嗟叹之，嗟叹之不足，故咏歌之，咏歌之不足，不知手之舞之足之蹈之也。 Poetry is where the will goes. While in one's heart, it is one's will; expressed in words, it is one's poetry. Emotion moves within and takes shape in words. Words are not enough, and so one sighs it. Sighing it is not enough, and so one draws it out in song. Drawing it out in song is not enough, and so all unawares one’s hands dance it and one’s feet tap it out.

The Great Preface to the Classic of Poetry (诗大序), author debated. 11th-7th century BC. Translated by Steven Van Zoeren in 1991, edited by Jay Zhang.

The Classic of Poetry (詩經), also called the Book of Odes, is one of China’s Five Classics and one of the oldest existing collection of Chinese poetry and folk songs, said to have been compiled by Confucius himself. In the longer of the two prefaces, the “Great Preface,” the author gives a short treatise on the entirety of the Classic of Poetry, explaining that poetry explains the author’s will, intentions, and ambitions. 

This idea of “poetry as the will” would come to influence Chinese literary theory for centuries to come, especially as the folk songs and poetry of the masses became a popular topic of study for aristocrats, officials, and rulers seeking to understand the plight of the common people — poetry would also later become both a key metric by which one’s intellectual and moral merits were measured, as well as an important tool for political protest and expression.

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

#shijing #classic of poetry #chinese poetry #chinese history #book of odes #jz #week 157

[sinetheta]

Language exists because nothing exists between those who express themselves. All language is therefore a language of prayer. Held in the dark, without sleep. Faith is the confession that there exists that wherein one is faithless. Wherein faith isolates a position of values there exists two essential hells. The one you are in. And the one you are after.

From Debts and Lessons by Lynn Xu. 2013.

Lynn Xu is a poet, editor and educator based in Marfa, United States. Born in Shanghai, their debut Debts and Lessons was a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize, and their poems have appeared in publications such as Best American Poetry 2008, Boston Review, Critical Quarterly amongst other publications. Their work is known for its lyric quality; writer Cathy Park Hong describes how their lines are crafted “so that they sing in a third language that always appears to stand on the threshold between languages, the threshold between the conscious and unconscious, and the threshold between the living and the dead”.

Named after the first part of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, Debts and Lessons uses history as a medium - both in the sense of being a means of, and as a way of communicating with the dead - to navigate contemporary life.

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#lynn xu #debts and lessons #chinese poetry #asian american poetry #spilled ink #poetry #week 157 #hw

[sinetheta]

Wink by HedgeHog ((刺猬). 2006.

HedgeHog are a Chinese indie rock band originating from Beijing, China. Formed in 2005, ZO and Atom started HedgeHog and were completed by bassist He Yifan in 2010. Their music mixes “hook-filled melodicism and quirky art rock”; capturing the wide-eyed optimism of early 2000s youth. Their dedication to establishing their own voice - even as they have had drastic stylistic changes between albums - has made them one of the best loved indie bands in China.

Wink is one of the main singles from their first album, Happy Idle Kid.

Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

#HedgeHog #Wink #chinese indie rock #indie rock #beijing #music #week 157 #hw

[sinetheta]

LAST CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS! ONE DAY LEFT to get your pieces in for Issue #13 “FORM 形”!

We are accepting visual and written works in all shapes and sizes until OCTOBER 1ST. “FORM 形” will drop in November.

Conceptual prompts are available on our website and on our Pinterest board

We welcome submissions from a wide range of media, including installations, digital art, cinematography, comics, etc. Please send your works to [email protected]. Submission guidelines can be found here.

Sine Theta Magazine is an international print-based creative arts magazine made by and for the Sino diaspora. We publish quarterly print editions showcasing art and writing by Sino creators from around the globe. If you are of Sino (Chinese, Taiwanese, Hong Kong, Macau) heritage, please consider submitting! If not, tell a friend who is! Sine Theta Magazine is a globally-accessible English language publication.

Don’t hesitate to contact us if you have any questions! We will be happy to get back to you!

Graphic by the talented Miki Wong

sinθ is an international print-based creative arts magazine made by and for the Sino diaspora.

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Follow sinθ magazine for more daily posts about Sino arts and culture.

#submit #call for submissions #magazine #publication #chinese diaspora #issue 13 #form