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Ivan Zhao - The Infinite Almanac

“December 16” in large letterset type on the left. Radiating out on the right is the text "Snow drifts toward the warm air, dissolving instantly.” The background is a teal cloudy sky.

Project Description

The Chinese lunisolar calendar (黄历) is a traditional time-tracking system meant to be useful for agricultural and cultural purposes. The history of the calendar is vast and complex, but at its core tracks both the cycles of the moon and the sun. The calendar is divided into 24 solar terms (节气), each marking a specific astronomical event or natural phenomenon throughout the year, further divided into three seasons (候), which often reflect a particular aspect of nature or change during that period. The Infinite Almanac is inspired by this traditional system and expands the 72 lines to a full calendar cycle of 365 days. Written in a style inspired by the renga (a Japanese poetry form), each line corresponds to a day of the year and reflects the changing seasons, natural phenomena, and cultural events associated with that day, and is intended to be read in any order throughout the year. The poem is a meditation on existence, moving between queerness, becoming, and loss, in relation to the everpresent changing of nature and the speaker’s own notion of self.

Perfect for fans of poetry, calendars, graphic design, and infinite scrolling.

Artist Bio

Ivan Zhao is a designer, programmer, and words artist based in San Francisco. His work reckons with digital, diasporic, and queer identity through permutations of forms and objects, the interaction between human and machine, and the mathematical and mechanical language of creation. His webart work can be found in Taper, thehtml.review, The New River, Adjacent, and Crawlspace, and his poetry can be found in Prism, Foglifter, Yalobusha Review, and elsewhere.

Q&A with Ivan Zhao

What tools, techniques, or skills did you use for this project?

Javascript, shaders, react, vite, INFINITE SCROLLLINNNNNGGG, and some background sounds of course.

Is there anything you’d like visitors to take away from this or consider going in?

In the creation of this project, I was thinking about the specificity and abstraction of the delineation of time, and how it is an extremely complicated process (and also hard work!) to calculate and move between the gregorian and lunisolar calendars, and the relationships between the two. I was also interested in the 72 pentad seasons, which has been referenced in many blog posts and other projects, and their intrinsic relationship to the poetic line.

What inspired you to create this project?

The text and graphic design from chinese calendars, of course, but I was finishing up a letterpress calendar project the week before and I was thinking about series, infinities, and the texts to jump off of to create a long extended poem, which reminded me about this calendar notion. From here, it made sense to pull a formal quality in extended poetry to have everything linked together, and also I was thinking a lot about Yiyun Li’s essay in The New Yorker about the constant return of spring. —

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