Author's Notes
Actively Bored
On He Xiangning: Ink & Intent
This poem came from a visit to an exhibition of He Xiangning's work — a Chinese revolutionary artist whose political biography is considerably larger than her paintings. The work was classical and carefully curated: selected for what it represents rather than what it does.
Standing in front of it, the speaker did not switch off. They became more alert.
The billboard appeared that morning before the museum. It asked nothing difficult. Neither did the exhibition. This similarity was not lost on the speaker, who had read two walls of biography before being invited to feel something in front of a lion.
The son is not incidental. He looked at the same paintings and arrived at the same place without any of the apparatus.