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John Yau was born in New York in 1950, where he still lives today. He is the son of Chinese-American parents who emigrated to the USA shortly before his birth. As far as art is concerned – and Yau is not only an author but also teaches art history at the Rutgers University in New Jersey – he found the poetry of the 1960s particularly appealing during his years as a student. Yau is one of the most important poets of his generation, and his work can best be classified as language poetry. His poems are often inspired by his working together with plastic artists such as painters and photographers. In his texts, John Yau goes searching for the structure of language, embracing not only the grammatical and structural aspects but also the semantic aspects of language, for example how language designates the foreign, the other, with words and terms, and how exclusion and oppression appear in language and ultimately therefore in the world. Alongside volumes of poetry, Yau has also made innumerable contributions to catalogues and art history works, and he was won many awards.
Publications:
My Symptoms (1998)
In Company: Robert Creeley's Collaborations (1999)
Borrowed Love Poems (2002)
Ing Grish (2005)
Paradiso Diaspora (2006)
In German:
Berlin Diptychon (Weidle Verlag, 1995)
New York Islands (artist’s book with Martin Noël, Weidle Verlag, 1999)
Andalusia (with drawings and photographs by Leiko Ikemura, Weidle Verlag, 2006)