Award Date

May 2023

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

English

First Committee Member

Donald Revell

Second Committee Member

Claudia Keelan

Third Committee Member

Jarret Keene

Fourth Committee Member

Ying Bao

Number of Pages

69

Abstract

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION is a book-length poem that uses two images: the Chinese character for dismantle, 拆, and the Beijing Subway map. 拆 was the character that government contractors spray painted on condemned buildings in urban renewal projects in Beijing. It is made of two components, hand and rebuke, which together mean dismantle. In Beijing, the neighborhood I grew up in went through two major changes according to urban renewal policy pushes: the first, destroying vernacular architecture, grey brick hutongs and replacing them with an exercise park; the second, further destruction of vernacular architecture and informal buildings to widen a street by two lanes. I needed to map movement, as movement is the permanence state of the city. According to the UN Report, “World Urbanization Prospects, 2018 Revision,” “more people live in urban areas than in rural areas, with 55 per cent of the world’s population residing in urban areas in 2018. In 1950, 30 per cent of the world’s population was urban, and by 2050, 68 per cent of the world’s population is projected to be urban.” I wanted to explore the types of environments that people live in and that I lived in. My project is a rejection of the idea that one must leave other people and the city to find beauty or connection, while acknowledging that many urban spaces do often oppress and confuse the “you” that moves through the city. Urban built environments generate perception in an individual that the individual remembers, and the rapid changes in built environments displace individual and collective memory. My primary goal, above all personal, global, or national context of the present, was to generate a beautiful and true art object.

Disciplines

Creative Writing

File Format

pdf

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Available for download on Wednesday, May 15, 2030


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