Interview with Shin Yu Pai

Over the past few days I've been interviewing Shin Yu Pai about her new chapbook Unnecessary Roughness:

JM:

The first person singular does not appear very much, if at all, in
Unnecessary Roughness yet I get a strong sense of a definite point of
view, of where "you" stand in relation to your materials.  Maybe you could
address the question of where the implied observer stands in relation to the
cultural clichés that you are subjecting to critique.  Feel free to correct
any misconceptions in my questions.

SYP:

The point of view in the "Unnecessary Roughness" poems is definitely that of
the critical observer on the sidelines who is more engaged voyeur than
fanatical participant. There is a sympathy towards the non-jocks throughout
this work who are the subject of marginalization and victimization as in for
example the "DODGEBALL" poem which relies heavily on cultural cliche to make
its point. I picture readers of this poem to have their own associations
with this sport (from childhood vs. say the Ben Stiller movie), identifying
with either the words on the outer ring of the structure or the language
inscribed within the center circle.  There is no need for an "I", because
the "I" is the reader who makes a choice to situate him/herself accordingly.

JM:

That rings true with how I read the book, reliving those days of Junior High
School Physical Education, which seemed to be an initiation, first of all,
into a certain kind of brutality.  I'm curious about your insight that
something supposedly done to promote health or "fitness" entails so much
threat of bodily harm.

SYP:

The first poems I wrote for the series were focused on football, hockey,
roller derby, etc.  I was very interested in the penalty language associated
with pro sports and how this particular language socializes violence... in
thinking about this violence further, it seemed to me that this rite of
initiation into tribe actually occurs at an even younger age in childhood
with sports like  "smear the queer" (a game I had never heard about until
doing some research into childhood games.)  I did some research into
dodgeball (aka "killer ball") for my piece and found a news story about a
P.E. teacher and school in Connecticut that tried to ban dodgeball from the
schoolyard.  The P.E. teacher had coaxed one of his less athletic somewhat
awkward students into entering a game.  Within about 5 seconds she had been
smashed in the face with a ball and had her nose and glasses broken.  The
argument to ban the game from schoolyards is that dodgeball doesn't really
teach any physical skills, although it's certainly effective in engendering
fear.  At a party last year, I met a phys. ed teacher who I chatted up about
sports.  She explained to me the different categories which games fall
into.. I think they were "blood and guts", "shits and giggles", and I can't
recall the other just now...

Games like dodgeball and foursquare were part of my own experience of
growing up - I was a skinny Asian girl with glasses in a predominantly
African American/Latin American elementary school in the sketchy part of
town. An easy target for many reasons...

Personal context aside, the poems of "Unnecessary Roughness" actually first
developed in response to the photographic work of Ferenc Suto, a fine art
photographer based in New York.  Ferenc was making these images of
adolescent looking models dressed in oppressive vintage sports gears, coping
with pain and oppression. Looking at these images really put things in a
certain context and stimulated certain memories of violence, both witnessed
and experienced.

JM:

I have to confess I played "smear the queer" quite often as a kid, without
any sense of what a "queer" was.

In relation to the look of your chapbook, it struck me that the layout of
your visual poems is often quite simple--a pair of concentric circles, two
parallel columns of words, an oval track with words scattered around it, a
chart that might have been drawn easily on microsoft word.  Working in
multiple media as you do, what is your conception of this book as a visual
object?

SYP:

The visual poems in the collection draw their shapes and structures in most
cases from the actual playing fields of sports - a roller derby track, a
swimming pool, a four square grid.  I also played around with scoreboards
and penalty box grids. Other poems take different strategies and are more
conventionally narrative and left justified on the page.

The xPress(ed) version of "Unnecessary Roughness" is the predecessor of a
larger project I am working on with Ferenc which incorporates several
hand-printed, distressed photographic images which we hope to publish as an
artist's book in time.  We've looked into presses that do photogravure and
presses with a strong interest in artists' collaborations.  So in the end, I
do see the final incarnation of this project as a very visual object.

JM:

Good luck with this project.  I was going to ask how Unnecessary Roughness fit in with your work as a whole, but you've already answered that in part.  To wrap up the interview, maybe you could give us a few more details about this artist book. 

SYP:

Sure, it's still very much a work in progress, my collaborator is working on
producing the images for the manuscript and ultimately we'd like to see the
work presented as both a book and as a possible traveling exhibition.  I'm
playing around with the idea of blowing up the texts, printing them using
vinyl lettering, and transferring them on to the wall alongside the framed
photographs. The texts aren't literal/illustrative responses to the images
but do connect loosely to the photos, which are diverse in subject: a boxer
in head gear, the back of someone's gender ambigous head wearing a lace-up
wrestling mask, the back of a swimmer's shaved head with goggles. Ferenc
uses some interesting processes to make these images - some of the works are
Polaroid collage, other are silver gelatin prints which are than bleached to
create a distressed/vintage quality.

Thanks for taking the time to interview me on this project, Jonathan!

JM:

You're welcome!