Initiated by CHERUBY resident artist and poet Precious Okoyomon, this session explores the relationship between poetry, everyday life, creative practice, and personal experience. For Okoyomon, poetry extends beyond the written word. It is intertwined with everyday rituals, emotional experience, and the ways we perceive and relate to the world around us. They connect poetry with love and the relationships between nature and all living things, approaching it as an ongoing creative process. When words are insufficient to convey a feeling, that feeling can take shape through space, objects, sound, and installation.

Okoyomon has explored the failures of language and communication as points of departure for their work, seeking new ways of connecting through poetry and different media. For them, poetry can both hold and convey feelings and serve as a means of connecting different lived experiences. Building on this perspective, the event approaches poetry as a practice intertwined with life, exploring how writing, reading, listening, and sharing can create connections between people, experiences, and practices.

In Earthseed (2020), presented at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (MMK) in Frankfurt, Okoyomon invited artists Jesse Darling and Rindon Johnson to read poetry together in an exhibition space surrounded by plants. The performance and its documentation, Reading to Plants (2020), bring poetry into relation with plants, space, and collective listening, extending the act of reading beyond the transmission of a written text.

In This God Is A Slow Recovery (2021), Okoyomon took failures of communication and moments when language breaks down as points of departure. Developed as a performance-activated installation, the work brought together spatial installation, poetry readings, and live music. Poets and performers took turns reading their own poems alongside Sky Song, a poem written by Okoyomon for the occasion, accompanied by a string trio. The work explores how poetry can create new forms of exchange when communication reaches an impasse, while bringing together voice, sound, space, and collective listening.

The session begins with Precious sharing their relationship with poetry and the role it plays in their creative work and everyday life. Shanghai-based poet Tianhe then hosts the session, inviting participating poets to read their work in turn.Poetry can be intertwined with writing, art, research, work, and personal experience, while also maintaining its own rhythm and way of being. Drawing on the specific experiences of the participants, the session will explore the different ways poetry finds meaning in everyday life and across diverse practices through readings and conversation.

Local Poet & Collaborator

Yanran Wang (Tian He) is a poet and curator who lives and works in Shanghai. Her practice moves between writing, research, and artistic action. Her poetry explores the heterogeneous transformation of classical sources within modern Chinese verse. She has long been involved in public poetry education and live poetry events, and has been invited to curate and lead poetry workshops for the Suzhou Museum of Contemporary Art, the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, the Shanghai Urban Space Art Season, and the Dingdu Poetry Festival. She is the author of the poetry collections Late Ripening (《晚熟》) and Xiao Jie Hui (《小劫灰》, forthcoming), and a co-founder of the art writing initiative SoftProof. She has been working at Chronus Art Center (CAC) since 2025.

Zhu Li is a poet based in Shanghai. Her work explores a lyric ethics grounded in embodied vulnerability and susceptibility, as well as the interplay between linguistic technologies and deep perception. Through creative practice, criticism, and media curation, she has long contributed to the public ecology of poetry. Recently, she has also co-initiated the Douve Librairie project and an art-writing collective called Softproof.

Yingchuan is a poet and curator, born in Shanghai in the summer of 1991. His poetry collection Auditory Hallucinations (《幻听》) was published by Showwe in 2019. Since 2015, he has undertaken creative, programming and editorial work for various cultural organisations, including Enclave, Century Duoyun（世纪朵云） and Shenshou Zhijian（神兽之间）. His projects include RAM Highlights 2022: The Good Life at Rockbund Art Museum, the inaugural Qingzhao International Poetry Festival, and the 2024 Dingdu Poetry Award.

How to Participate

Audience: Everyone with an interest in poetry is welcome to come and listen. Please register via mini programme.

Readers: We are inviting 5 volunteers to read or share. Poets and friends from all creative, research and professional backgrounds are welcome to share their own poems or someone else’s, or to speak about how poetry connects to their personal life, work and practice. Each reading is about 3–5 minutes.

Please send a short introduction and the text you would like to share (an English version is welcome but optional, and we can help) to info@cheruby.com by 24:00 on 4 November. CHERUBY will review submissions and notify selected readers by email by 6 November.