The name Luo Yijun calls to mind a kind of absolute literature that transcends experience and creates experience. Born in Taipei in 1967, Lui Yijun started his writing career in college. He won the National Taiwan Literature Award in 2009 and the Dream of the Red Chamber Award in 2010. At their core, Luo’s works are about urban existence in modern Taipei, but he comes up with his own trajectories out of the concave continuities in a heterogeneity of experiences, video games, rumors, news events, Facebook posts, memories, dreams, letters, and readings. Luo’s polychromatic word-images mesh together to turn out fictional scenes full of complications, innuendos, and goosebump-inducing weirdness, fictional scenes that demand a reconstruction of everything you thought you knew. With his prodigious narrative ability, Luo has pioneered a uniquely fictional space-time that makes him one of the most original writer in Taiwan. Although Luo as a storyteller is a wildman, the man himself is humble: he claims that unlike those of his father’s generation, whose lives were filled with stories, he was born into an era of “experience deficiency.
Luo compares himself to Aesop’s crow in borrowed feathers. When God held a contest to find the most beautiful bird, a dazzling five-color bird stood out from the others, caught His eye and was crowned champion. However, upon closer scrutiny, the other contestants, including a peacock, a flamingo, a nightingale, a blue magpie, and an owl found their feathers among the plumage of the five-color bird. Incensed, they rushed toward it and retrieved their feathers. The five-color bird is humiliatingly exposed as a black crow. “Spencer Tunick (a nude photographer who appears as a character in Luo Yijun’s Xixia Lüguan or Xixia Inn) says this is my story. Sometimes people can’t tell when I’m writing from my own experience and when I’m borrowing from others. Like the crow that used borrowed feathers to reinvent itself in a dazzling new form, I borrow stories from others that I find magical and enthralling.” (Notes of an Experience Deficient Man). What the crow does not know is that it represents the origin of art, because art has always come from the cultivation of craftsmanship, never from inborn nature. A peacock is born to be a peacock, a flamingo to be a flamingo. Their appearances are merely God’s gift, a fulfillment of the nature they have been given. ”