Ya-Wen Ho

INFO

Name	Ya-Wen Ho (she/her)
Born	1987
Country of Birth	Taiwan
Place of Residence	Pōneke Wellington
Ethnicities	Taiwanese (Hakka)
Artform	Literature, Zines
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Ya-Wen Ho is a 1.5-generation Taiwanese Hakka New Zealand poet, graphic designer, researcher and zinemaker whose work exists at the intersection of academia and community arts. As an acclaimed poet, Ho has published work with Tinfish Press (Hawaii, 2012) and won multiple literary awards including a Horoeka/Lancewood Reading Grant in 2015 and the Ema Saiko Poetry Fellowship at New Zealand Pacific Studio in 2016. Her zinemaking practice is rooted in community publishing and providing space for experimental arts, as exemplified by her literary zine Potroast.

Ho was born in Taipei and immigrated to Aotearoa at the age of seven. She grew up in Bucklands Beach, Tāmaki Makaurau in the 1990s. In an interview with Te Papa’s Asia New Zealand Histories curator Grace Gassin, Ho reflects on the unique experience she had learning Mandarin through creative writing as a child:

Instead of just teaching us Mandarin, [our tutor] actually taught us creative writing and so, from the age of eight or nine, we were getting really invaluable feedback from an experienced editor on how to write creatively in Mandarin.

Being bilingual in Mandarin and English has had a profound impact on Ho’s work and she often intertwines the two languages in her poetry:

Writing is an assertive act… I write to synthesise all the culture I voraciously consume into something of my own that I can feed back into the conversation. I do not want non-participation to render me invisible again.

Her bilingual background and freelance graphic design work has also led her to design the first English-Mandarin bilingual edition of Best New Zealand Poems in 2014.

Ho’s work is often concerned with the politics of writing between languages, the complexities of translation and the effects of linguistic colonisation. Her writing style reflects these tensions — experimental syntax teases apart grammatical permutations and blurs the meaning of words from within. Writer Anna Livesy describes Ho’s work as “an ongoing attempt to showcase language gestures as translation...the way that words convert or distort or change or misrepresent".

Ho has been greatly involved in the Aotearoa zinemaking community and was a Wellington Zinefest Committee Member in 2013. For Ho, zines provide a sense of agency for minority communities and “circulate writing and voices that would otherwise go unpublished and unheard”. In 2009, she was the founding editor of Potroast zine - an A5 hand-stitched “annual literary magazine of original short-fiction, poetry, illustration, photography and art”. Focused on the importance of innovation and experimenting with alternative forms of literature, the zine featured artists from both Aotearoa and abroad. Many Potroast contributors were or went on to become notable figures in the arts scene, such as Marc Conaco and Renee Liang. The zine was discontinued in 2015.

Ho was recently a letterpress researcher at Wai-te-ata Press where she investigated the history of Chinese-language print practices and archived the collection of Chinese type used to print the NZ Chinese Growers’ Monthly Journal (1952–72).