20 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY NOVEMBER 7-13, 2024 www.montereycountynow.com where I found the energy to lift my father and bathe my mother every day. Anyway, they glowed when they died in their bed. That’s the biggest achievement in my life.” Her father is here, Yang says, as she walks through the Monterey Museum of Art gallery where his and her images are hanging. “It’s so weird,” she adds. Joseph Yang’s paintings are landscapes, California landscapes shaped by Chinese art, by bold lines that represent movement, a flow of energy, an important concept in traditional Chinese art. A woman and her mother who happen to be visiting the museum join Yang’s spontaneous tour. “Before my father was born, China went through 200 years of wars, followed by Communism,” Yang says, standing in between two of his untitled pieces that show gray rocks and mountains, curiously never people, whose absence offers peace to the eyes. “People disappeared in the chaos of war. The stories he told me were giving voice to very small lives, people who made fertilizer, people who made pancakes.” After Tiananmen, Joseph Yang closed his art and jewelry store in Carmel. Then, he devoted himself to painting in secret. Would he be surprised to see his work in the Monterey Museum of Art? Yang laughs and says he would be surprised, and pleased. “He was quite in awe of the museum,” she says, recalling the times of her first MMA exhibit in the 1990s, where she presented images from her first book, Baba: A Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders. They include maps of her father’s journey from Manchuria to China and what he experienced along the way—people, animals, cities, hospitality, hostility, mountains and many working people. In the current exhibit, her work can be divided between two categories: enlarged pages from her graphic novel that, by the way, also has hilarious dialogues. The second category is extremely colorful—dark red, vivid blue, unapologetically bright yellow— pieces. Some of them are so packed with the content that everything has to be in miniature—the inside of a whole town, such as “A Dream” from the Odyssey Of Manchuria. “In China, I learned a new style that combines old traditions of painting,” Yang says. “But my subject matter is more Western.” One thing not to be found in Western pieces is the Chinese perspective of the bird’s eye, looking down into the subject matter, as in “The Big White Celebration,” a piece that comes from Baba: Return to China Upon My Father’s Shoulders. It shows a red devil chasing after terrified people. “I want to remove the trauma,” Yang says about the exhibit. “The ancestral trauma we brought with us [from China], but also the trauma of AIDS. We are here to study in a school of life. And life is never done with you. I love the world, but I’m ready to go tomorrow.” Imagining China: The Art of Belle Yang and Joseph Yang is on display until Sunday, Nov. 24. Monterey Museum of Art, 559 Pacific St., Monterey. $15/ general admission; free/students, military, youth ages 18 and under; EBT cardholders. 372-5477, montereyart.org, belleyang.com. This image comes from Yang’s third book, the 2010 graphic novel Forget Sorrow: An Ancestral Tale. It features a young Belle as a first-person narrator, but most of the book dives into historic family stories as told to her by her father. COURTESY OF THE YANG COLLECTION. © BELLE YANG
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