Zhai Yongming Comments

Zhai Yongming (born 1955) is from Chengdu, Sichuan province, China, and a graduate of its University of Electronic Science and Technology. After being sent away for two years during the Cultural Revolution to do manual labor in the countryside, she returned to Chengdu.

In 1981 she began to publish her poems, and from the late 1980s she became a full-time writer in the Chengdu Academy of Literature. Her poetry collections include Women, Above All the Roses, Collected Poems of Zhai Yongming and Plain Songs in the Dark Night.

With her ‘consciousness of darkness’ Zhai Yongming probes the realms of eroticism, voyeurism and madness, and opens new possibilities for aesthetic creation. Based on her individual experience, she creates a poetic world saturated with nightmare, dream, delirium, fantasy and hallucination.

It is a dark world that is, nonetheless, imbued with a feminist concern for the fate of Chinese women in the past and present.

Zhai Yongming has lived in the United States from 1990 to 1992.