Gregory Kan

INFO

Name	Gregory Kan (he/him)
Also known as	Greg Kan
Born	1987
Country of Birth	Singapore
Place of Residence	Pōneke Wellington
Ethnicities	Singaporean Chinese
Artform	Literature, Visual arts
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Gregory Kan is a poet, arts writer and coder based in Pōneke Wellington. His writing is characterised by vivid, cinematic imagery expressed through fragmented, non-linear narratives. Self-imposed restraints and the repurposing of texts feature in his writing and process, which often spiral around the ambiguity of memory and autobiography through an indeterminate address. His two volumes of poetry, This Paper Boat (2016) — shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for Best Poetry — and Under Glass (2019), were published by Auckland University Press.

Kan and his parents moved to Tāmaki Makaurau from Singapore in 2001. Six years later, Kan turned eighteen and was required to complete 24 months of compulsory military service with the Singapore Armed Forces. Kan wrote about this formative experience for the Pantograph Punch in 2013 and in tangential ways throughout both of his books.

Following his military conscription and return to Aotearoa, Kan immediately began his tertiary studies, completing his Bachelor of Arts at the University of Auckland in 2011. In 2012 he was awarded a Master's in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters (IIML) at Victoria University.

In 2016, as part of a vocational coding course, Kan developed glass.leaves, an app allowing for the manipulation of texts via an assortment of procedures such as ‘get adjectives’, ‘shuffle verbs’, and ‘swap in nouns from another text’. This freely accessible tool can be used for "analysis, critique and deconstruction, as well as the raw generation of possibilities as part of the creative process." Kan took inspiration for the app from a flatmate who made use of sampling to create electronic music on his computer:

Basically, I was like, why do you have that software and I don’t? [...] That [type of] technology really changed the culture around what it meant to be a musician and to make music, in a really productive and good way. It opened it up to more people.[...] I love that idea. You don’t have to have a Masters in poetry to write poetry.

Kan frequently speaks about demystifying the writing or creative process, emphasising the fundamentally shared nature of language. In 2023, he instigated a series of talks discussing practice and process with fellow artists and writers, so far including Sorawit Songsataya, Ana Iti and Essa May Ranapiri.

Kan was a Grimshaw-Sargeson Fellow in 2017, during which time he wrote the bulk of Under Glass. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals, including Atlanta Review, Cordite, Landfall, Ōrongohau Best New Zealand Poems and SPORT, as well as in art journals, exhibition catalogues and publications for contemporary art institutions including Artspace Aotearoa, the Adam Art Gallery, the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the Physics Room.