16 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY november 7-13, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com Carmel artist Belle Yang channels trauma into art, revealing herself and her past to the world. By Agata Pop˛eda Art of Generations It’s not the first time Carmelbased writer and artist Belle Yang is showing her work to the world. Her previous show at the Monterey Museum of Art took place in 1996, almost 30 years ago, around the time she started experiencing the first symptoms of HIV/AIDS. She lived quietly with the disease, and the stigma surrounding it, for the last 30 years. Now, she has decided to share her story, the story of a straight woman who never drinks or does drugs, who contracted AIDS—and has survived. Yang has previously shared intimate stories of herself and her family, revealed through her art—now she is sharing those stories in the context of her health. The diagnosis provides for an experience that couldn’t be without influence on her life as an artist. Bringing back her work from various times of her life, including before AIDS, and bringing her father’s artwork into the MMA exhibit, titled Imagining China: The Art of Belle Yang and Joseph Yang, is revisiting her story as an artist and a person, this time with everything laid bare. Maybe she has the type of personality that needs to tell the truth, Yang wonders. Then she adds: “I tend to open my mouth if that can help other people.” She hopes to remove both stigma and trauma. She sees the current exhibit as a way to talk about trauma, both in the context of what happened to her, but also what happened to her family—ancestral trauma. But how and when does this story start? Maybe with the Japanese occupation of Manchuria (from 1931-1932), before China regained control of that Artist and AIDS survivor Belle Yang in her family house in Carmel, posing with her parrot, Ruby. Daniel Dreifuss
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