"Three ways of folding paper dragons": Ma Yuan and Chinese postmodernism

However, several writers have emerged from Chinese postmodernism whose works have been widely disseminated, such as Yu Hua and the Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan.

EVENT IN GERMAN

Ma Yuan, born in 1953, is one of the most influential authors of Chinese postmodernism. His stories were written in the 1980s, when the Cultural Revolution was over and the joy of experimentation was great. They are set in the periphery of the People's Republic: in Tibet, in the Trans-Himalayan mountains or in the inhospitable north of China. A character called "Ma Yuan" goes to a leprosy village to do research - or perhaps he just made up the journey. An expedition sets off for the Tibetan highlands to find a supposedly sighted snowman and a dinosaur-sized sheep skull. In a Maoist displacement camp, a dispute over a missing cap sets off a chain reaction.

The texts, many of them autofictional, are saturated with breaks in fiction and alienation effects, interspersed with a confusing game of truth and lies. Their actual theme is often the narrative itself, which in Ma Yuan's work is discontinuous and fractured, a 'damaged' one that manages to establish connections beyond causality along winding paths: such as those of dream logic or association. Again and again, Ma Yuan makes us realise that every narrative is also a lie and a deception. The reading will be moderated by Yingying Song.

The author: Ma Yuan 马原 (not present at the reading). Ma Yuan was born in 1953 in Liaoning, North China. During the Cultural Revolution, he was sent to the countryside for "re-education" and trained as an ironworker at a university for railway construction. After the Cultural Revolution, he studied Chinese literature and then went to the Tibetan capital Lhasa as a radio journalist in the 1980s.

There he began publishing short stories and quickly became famous for his literary techniques, which influenced many fellow writers of his generation. Ma Yuan left Lhasa in 1989 for health reasons. He was a professor at Tongji University in Shanghai for a long time and wrote for radio and television. Latest novel publication: 牛鬼蛇神 ("Cattle Spirits, Snake Gods", 2012). Ma Yuan lives in Xishuangbanna, Yunnan, in the mountains, where he is currently collecting and writing down local legends.

Die Übersetzerin: Julia Veihelmann, 1984 in Stuttgart geboren. Sie hat am Deutschen Literaturinstitut Leipzig studiert, danach Asienwissenschaften/Sinologie in Berlin, Bochum und Taipei. Drei literarische Publikationen (Unterkunft, Die Grundprinzipien der Navigation, Der dritte Versuch). Sie verdient ihr Geld als freiberufliche Textarbeiterin, unter anderem mit Übersetzungen aus dem Chinesischen und mit Lektoraten. 2023/2024 verbrachte sie ein Jahr in Chongqing, China, wo sie an der Southwest University Deutsch unterrichtete.

Die Moderatorin: Yingying Song, geboren 1986 in Shanghai, siedelte 1992 nach Berlin über. Sie war Jungstudentin mit Hauptfach Klavier an der Hochschule für Musik Hanns-Eisler und schloss das Studium der Rechtswissenschaften mit dem 1. Staatsexamen ab. Sie gewann u. a. den 2. Preis der Deutschen Bahn für junge Musiker und den 2. Preis beim Literaturwettbewerb Literaturort Prenzlauer Berg, und war Stipendiatin der Romanwerkstatt des Literaturforums am Brecht-Haus. Yingying lebt und schreibt in Berlin.