“begin again”: Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh) and Li Yuan-chia

This lecture explores the artistic dialogue between the Benedictine monk, poet, and artist Dom Sylvester Houédard and the Chinese-born artist Li Yuan-chia. Through their artworks, poems, poem-objects, and correspondence from the 1960s and 1970s, it examines how the Eastern concept of the interdependence of self and other informed their creative practices. Focusing on language, performance, and spirituality, the talk considers how both artists addressed what Houédard called the ‘unwordable problem’ of identity and selfhood in the context of migration, displacement, sexuality, war, and geopolitics, while situating their exchange within the international networks of the post-war avant-garde.

Dr Nicola Simpson is a Research Fellow at Norwich University of the Arts. Her research and curatorial interests are in Concrete Poetry, poemenvironments and Art and Language. She is particularly interested in the influence and integration of Zen and Tantric Buddhisms on Performance Art, Conceptual Art, Participation Art and Kinetic Sculpture. She is editor of Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter: The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard (Occasional Papers, 2012) and co-editor of Dom Sylvester Houédard (Richard Saltoun, Riding House, 2017).

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