Christopher (Kit) Kelen is a well known Australian poet, scholar and visual artist, and Professor of English at the University of Macau, where he has taught Creative Writing and Literature for the last fourteen years. Volumes of his poetry have been published in Chinese, Portuguese, Italian, Swedish and Filipino languages. The most recent of Kit Kelen’s dozen English language poetry books is China Years – New and Selected Poems. His next volume of poems Scavengers Season is being published by Puncher and Wattman in 2014. The most recent of Kelen’s half dozen solo painting exhibitions was held in May-June, 2013 at the Galeria do Salao Medieval, Largo do Paco, Braga, Portugal. For the last several years Kelen has been facilitating the translation of Chinese poetry into English and Australian poets into Chinese, projects which have so far produced a dozen large scale bilingual anthologies. Kelen has published two scholarly volumes about poetry: Poetry, Consciousness, Community (Rodopi 2009) and City of Poets – Exploring Macao Poetry Today (ASM, 2009). Kelen’s theoretical study of national songs, Anthem Quality has just been published by Intellect Press in the UK and the University of Chicago Press. Kit Kelen is the Editor of the new cross-arts international on-line journal the wonderbook and is Literary Editor for Postcolonial Text.

 

Welcome to an experiment in dialogue between word and image. Pictures of Nothing at All is a playful cross-media and cross-cultural meditation on the idea of abstraction. Falling into this work you find yourself travelling across a contradiction – pictures being of ‘nothing at all’ cannot strictly represent anything, while words (in every language) cannot help but represent, no matter how simple or abstract or archetypal they seem to be. In this exhibition cum book, words and pictures make new and unexpected meanings. The poem dissolves into a picture. The picture suggests a story. You have to make your own journey here. You have to be lost to find a way. If you take the time required to get yourself lost, you will find that the mind maze you’re in is something you have made yourself, in cooperation with Kit Kelen. Welcome then to a collaboration in meaning, in seeing, in dreaming. It’s a collaboration you won’t avoid if you accept this one artist’s invitation to step into the work.