K. Anthony Jones discusses "Sung Tieu: Civic Floor" while sharing his research while exploring the embrace between biography and art, as it is encapsulated in Tieu’s modernist vernacular.
What is the meaning of life when we speak of lives that are in peril? How can lives be measured in size and in scale? Life is the subject of this lecture: how life is defined, and how certain forms of life are not acknowledged by the State, or are absent from the archives, or/and only realized in the broad pen strokes of a novelist’s prose. What does life mean for those who lead precarious lives, and for those who are denied humanity? Whether life can be pinned down, measured, and linguistically reached as defined by biology, biography, and history, and how these categories relate to the erection of borders and territories that are the contours and the calcification of race, ethnicity, and nationality, leaving members of society on the outside and homeless: these are the terrains which this disquisition will traverse.