30 May An interview with Ruoyun Chen

Ruoyun is a filmmaker, poet and engineer. She is directing People’s Republic of Letters, a documentary on Chinese poets, at home and of the diaspora, co-created with five poets around the world. During her time at MIT, developing the film, she has also been working on an immersive and interactive audio experience related to memory.

An interview with Ruoyun Chen by Karen Cirillo

My research question when I entered Open DocLab was about poetry in different languages, the language of poetry, and poetry as this space where people can connect. I wondered why people write poetry in a language other than their mother tongue, or in a different environment. I was looking at how we navigate the state of in-betweenness. No matter where we are, we all confront the challenge of maintaining a dialogue with our homeland.

So you have a background in urban design and engineering…how did that influence your visual art work?

I came to the US to study engineering and stayed at Cornell for 10 years – for my Master’s, then working for my professor, and then I joined the PhD program. For students who come from China, it’s studying Engineering is a typical way. In my last year of the PhD, I started to make this documentary I’m making now. In the second half of my PhD, I went to New York a lot to watch film, which I think really changed me, somehow liberating me to do the things that I always wanted to do. I don’t really see any lineage between what I was doing at school and what I’m doing now. I was doing engineering, so there’s a lot of algorithm, modeling and assumption. But I don’t feel that’s really how I communicate with real people in real life. Shifting from equations to poetry was a very a big leap for me, but in a way it also felt like a return, because I always wrote poetry when I was in China.

I came to the U.S. from China to study engineering and ended up spending a decade at Cornell—first for my Master’s, then working for my professor, and eventually joining the PhD program. For many Chinese students, pursuing STEM is a typical path to settle in the U.S. Even though I’ve loved the arts since childhood, I never considered it a viable career—most Chinese families view it as too unstable. However, in the latter half of my PhD, I started traveling to New York City more often, attending film festivals and cultural events. That experience liberated me, prompting me to finally pursue what I’d always wanted. In my final year of the PhD, I began making the documentary I’m working on now. Looking back, even though I majored in engineering, my PhD research already focused on understanding human behavior, using game-theoretical approaches to model how people’s choices influence one another in networks. Still, going from equations to poetry, from communicating with machines through algorithms to conversing with documentary subjects through lens, was a significant leap—yet, in many ways, it also felt like a return.

What inspired you to transitioninto embracing your artistic side?

During COVID, China was in lockdown and I wasn’t able to return for three years. But it was also the time that a lot of online workshops emerged, and people were gathering online to do poetry things.

That was how I got to know the person who ended up as the first character in my film, Shishi. She was locked in her bedroom in Shanghai a long time, but she’s hosting this poetry workshop. I thought it was really amazing that poetry has this transcendent ability that can bring people together around the world, even if she herself was confined in that bedroom.

Shortly after that I also attended a workshop taught by a poet who came from China but only wrote in English. He actually has the same background with me: a Chinese student who came to the US to study Civil Engineering. He has to hide his LGBT identity from his Chinese family, which is actually one of the reasons that he chooses to write poetry in English. And in his workshop, he asked that we write poetry in English. It was impossible for me to think about [doing that] at first. One assignment was ekphrasis, which is a type of poetry based on a visual art piece, and I was wondering what I should write about,

It was my father’s 60^th birthday, and he sent me the satellite image of his hometown and suddenly explained where he was born, where my grandparent got exiled to during the Cultural Revolution and everything about his history. So I decided to write a poem about that satellite image. This is actually my first poem to my family, and it was strangely born in English, so the whole thing just got me thinking… Why did I have to hide behind another foreign language to express myself to my family?

And how did the film idea develop?

So first meeting Shishi, the poet confined in Shanghai, and then this personal experience got me thinking about making a documentary about Chinese young poets who write in different languages and voice in the diaspora. So I asked Shishi’s roommate to record some footage of her teaching the class and to deal with the daily quarantine for me. And that was the beginning of the film, in 2022.

Also, four months after I wrote that poem to my father, he became very ill, but I wasn’t able to go back to China because of the quarantine. (By the time I got it back, his funeral has already passed.) So this was another layer.

The film became a story about how we lost the home we knew in some way, and how we’re trying to reconstruct that home through poetry. I followed 20 poets in the beginning, but now the film is focusing on five.

How did the connection with Open DocLab come about?

After the first year of research, I applied to the Open DocLab, which was the first institution to recognize the project. It was fascinating to me why they choose this project as part of the lab, because other projects are more high-tech and immersive. But I think I’m here because of the co-creation element of my project- the film is being made with these poets around the world.

In the beginning, I felt like it was too different from other projects, this wasn’t meant for me. But when I joined the labs meeting, I realized many people have documentary-making experience, so they have inspiring things for me every meeting. And then I also started to develop an immersive piece based on this project and my personal experience. So these two projects I’m researching and developing at ODL.

It’s been quite an exploratory journey – has your research question changed from when you entered?

Yes, it became more about my generation, more a way for poetry to speak about belonging and freedom and what poetry means to the diaspora of this generation. The poets in the film are all my contemporaries. We were born in the 1990s under China’s one child policy, growing up during its golden age of openness with emerging possibilities, travel and exchange. We always considered ourselves as global villagers. The generations before and after ours can be very different—often more conservative ideologically. But now we find ourselves in a world where the possibilities for openness, inclusivity, and exchange we once believed in can no longer be taken for granted. We face a conservative socio-political landscape, poor economy, tightened censorship in our country and the closing off of public spaces.

Poetry, especially in a different language that is not Chinese, allows us to express ourselves in ways we can’t in the Chinese context. However, while poets in China struggle with publishing under censorship, writers working with non-native language in the West are often expected to deliver immigrant narratives.

So now the research question became not just about poetry, but more about how our generation, living within fractures, navigates a sense of in-betweenness and strives to mend these breaks with our creative works, collective memories and imaginations. The co-creation was really important for the intimacy and care for me to capture this.

Can you talk about the co-creation process?

It started practically, because it was COVID and I couldn’t go to these places. So people were filming themselves, or friends, roommates were filming them. Sometimes where the restrictions or the lockdowns were not as heavy, I would be able to hire someone to film on my behalf.

Maybe they can only record audio, or maybe they’re filming with their phone. So the quality is not always great, but what is important about it is the intimacy. When you’re co creating…I mean, all documentary is really co creation. You’re co-creating reality. The film is a co-creation of another person’s life, their reality. Them filming themselves or friends filming them had this level of intimacy that I wouldn’t be able to get. Also, because I might not know the codes or culture of that place, they can have a closer perspective to what is filmed. I think there should be co-creation in all documentary for this authenticity.

In terms of filming, how was it letting go of that control? With so many people, that must mean very different footage.

This is a bit of the hard part. A lot of industry people, especially here in the US, have said they expect a poetry film to be beautiful, to have beautiful images.  It might seem natural to equate “poetic” with “beautiful,” but for me, poetry can be so much more. It can be angry, strange or confusing, yet it all ultimately leads toward truth. Like you noted, I have many different styles coming from different places all over the world, including zoom calls, dv or home phone footage. And while it’s intimate, it doesn’t always match visually. So you have a very hard task when it comes to editing all that material together. I think that, in this sense, making a documentary is much like writing poetry. Shaping a narrative from chaotic footage—drawn from different visuals and different stories—resembles the way a poet writes, edits and erases lines from their experience and actuality. Here at ODL I’m also working on figuring out the language and the structure of the film.

So far, what have been the benefits of being at ODL?

One of the benefits here is having all these other artists and technologists to talk to and discuss. I learned a lot from them about how to talk about things, how to think about things, how to look at stuff in new ways. Sometimes in the group sessions I am quiet, but I have really valuable encounters with the other fellows one-on-one.

When I came into ODL, I came in with more of a traditional film, which was interesting to them from co-creation side. In the process of being here and having conversations, I also started to think a lot about immersive pieces. I never intended to create an immersive experience until I learned about projects of Rashin Fahandej, Sahar Sajadieh and my mentor Halsey Burgund.

I was thinking about the audio material that I had from the time when my father was dying. During the 40 days from when my father first fell ill until he passed away, my mother sent me daily voice messages and audio recordings of her conversations with his doctors and nurses to keep me informed—since China’s Zero COVID Policy prevented me from returning home. Every day, I would walk from my home in Brooklyn to Chinatown, where I would go to the temple to pray. And I would buy a blue crab. One of the things we have is the blue crab – you say a prayer, and then you release aquatic animal to put the prayer out into the universe. So when I would walk across the Manhattan Bridge, I would listen to these audio messages, and then I would pray, and then I would release the crab into the East River. Every day, I would do this as a way of processing and being with my family. Now I’m developing an audio immersive piece that utilizes those soundtracks.

The piece begins with a hallway lined with hospital chairs, which serves as my “Manhattan Bridge”;  in my reality, while crossing this “bridge”, I listened to voice messages from a hospital on the other side of the world, waiting for news about my loved one who was ill. As you walk down the hallway, you’re invited to sit on one of the chairs and write something—perhaps a person’s name, a place or a meaningful object—that you wish to pray for or reconnect with.

From there, you enter a dome that symbolizes a temple. In the center is a prayer wheel as in the Buddhist tradition. One visitor at a time will push and rotate the wheel, with each turn representing a single day. The visitor hears audio recordings from my mother, immersing them in that urgent, desperate and isolated confinement. Each time the wheel turns, an aquatic animal is digitally released into the dome—symbolizing the Buddhist act of releasing living creatures. After 40 rotations, all the animals and notes written by visitors are digitally scattered throughout the dome.

I’m really looking forward to making this, although it could be hard to raise funds, especially in this challenging time. I have the research money to research the film, but I don’t have the money to finish the film production or make the immersive piece. I have been self-producing both projects so far, and now am looking for collaborators.

What will you be doing in the next period of your fellowship?

In terms of the next year, I need to find a producer and to work on an edit of the film. I will try to make this immersive piece in my last year.

And now that COVID is over, have you finally met all your poets in person?

Yes! I’ve had the chance to meet all of them in the places where they live. It’s so strange to encounter them in person, at first it’s a bit awkward. It’s like you know them so well, you know so much about their lives, yet you have never actually met them in person. And they don’t know the same amount about you. But after a short period of time together, the awkwardness goes away and the connection is there.