The exhibition THE FEMALE GAZE opens with a question, “Is there a female gaze in art?”. While the exhibition tries to answer this question with works by six German female artists, the accompanying talk to the exhibition, “Female Gaze in Literature” tries to answer a similar question “Is there a woman’s perspective in Literature?” with a conversation between two local female authors.
Virginia Woolf wrote in 1929 that it is necessary for a woman to have five hundred a year and a room with a lock on the door if she is to write fiction or poetry. Now almost a hundred years have passed since the publication of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own”, how true and relevant is her comment to all the women out there pursuing their dream of being an author?
On Thursday, 13th April, we are glad to have Belle Ling and Eva Wong, two female authors from Hong Kong, to talk about their works and their creative process. This event will be moderated by Kathrin Bode, a German scholar who has been translating Hong Kong authors’ works into German in the past few years since she starts teaching at the Hong Kong Baptist University.
The talk will be accompanied by a musical performance by Amelia Chan, a violinist and the current concertmaster of the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong.
Belle Ling was born and grew up in Hong Kong. She received her PhD in Creative Writing at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her first poetry collection A Seed and a Plant was shortlisted for The HKU International Poetry Prize 2010. Her poetry manuscript Rabbit-Light was highly commended in the 2018 Arts Queensland Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. In the same year, her other manuscript Grass Flower Head was shortlisted for the First Book Poetry Prize of Puncher and Wattmann in Australia. Her poem “63 Temple Street, Mong Kok” was a co-winner in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize 2018 held by the Australian Book Review. Recently, her poem “Cucumber and the Catbus Club” was shortlisted for The Aesthetica Creative Writing Award 2023 in the UK. She is now teaching at The University of Hong Kong. Her passion lies in encouraging multilingual literary creations and exploring the cultural dialogue between the 21st-century artists of all forms and writers of various genres (www.hkuguild.com).
Wong Yi is an award-winning Hong Kong writer, librettist, radio show host, and editor at Fleur des Lettres. In 2020, she was named one of 20 Young Sinophone Novelists to Watch by the Taiwanese literary magazine Unitas. She is the author of four short story collections: Ways To Love In A Crowded City (2021), The Four Seasons of Lam Yip (2019), Patched Up (2015), and News Stories (2010). She was the Hong Kong Writer-in-residence for Hong Kong Baptist University's first Chinese Writers Workshop in 2021, Writer-in-residence for Hong Kong Education University in 2023, and has participated in events such as the Singapore Writers Festival, Singapore Book Fair, Hong Kong International Literary Festival, and Taipei International Book Exhibition.
Kathrin Bode studied the Chinese language in Bonn, Germany and Wuhan, Hubei-province. She has previously worked as a German teacher in the Universities of Bonn and Cologne as well as from 2015 to 2019 at University of Foreign Studies in Tianjin. In 2020 she started teaching at Baptist University in Hong Kong. She has translated short stories of the Chinese writer Ye Shengtao and Zhou Daxin from Chinese into German. Recently she translated poems by Lin Bai. She is presently working on a collection of short stories from Feng Jicai. Having come across writers from Hong Kong only a short time ago, she is very much intrigued by the dynamic and creativity of this circle. With this event and the translation of writers from Hong Kong she hopes to make Hong Kong Literature known to a broader German speaking audience. Most recently, a short story by Hong Kong author Tong Yui was translated by Kathrin Bode and published in the “Hefte für Ostasiatische Literatur”.
Violinist:
Amelia Chan
Amelia holds undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees from the Mannes College of Music and Manhattan School of Music (NY). She began her violin study in the junior school at the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts. As a chamber musician, Amelia Chan has served as first violinist of the Montclaire String Quartet, and has appeared as soloist with orchestras including the West Virginia Symphony, the International Virtuosi Orchestra on tour in Central America, the New Amsterdam Symphony Orchestra, and many others. Amelia is currently concertmaster of the City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong.
Details
Goethe-Institut Hongkong
14/F Hong Kong Arts Centre
2 Harbour Road, Wan Chai
Hong Kong
