William Yang: Shame & shamelessness SUSAN BEST We’d met once before and he had initiated our friendship on Facebook. I requested he bring a pair of plain underpants to the shoot as a way of preparing him for my intention to take partially naked photos, although I hadn’t expected the underpants to be black or cut in the manner of old style Speedos. He was a photographic virgin, at first slightly intimidated by the camera then becoming more relaxed. Turns out he was photogenic. When I look at the photos I can imagine Caravaggio. 44 WILLIAM YANG Imagining Caravaggio 2012 WILLIAM YANG: SHAME & SHAMELESSNESS 45 Shame and a certain kind of shamelessness are two affects consistently woven through the work of William Yang. The word ‘shamelessness’, which should simply mean the absence of shame — ‘showing a lack of shame’, according to the dictionary — strangely also has a negative meaning. ‘Shameless’ implies that shame should be felt, and that the person displaying this quality is too bold or outrageous. In English there is not, then, a neutral way of describing the absence or, more importantly, the reworking of shame. Yet, in Yang’s oeuvre, a transformation of shame is clearly at work, both in relation to his Chinese identity and his portraits of the LGBTIQ+ community. Yang’s photography draws comparisons with that of American artist Nan Goldin. Goldin and Yang both use photography in a diaristic, highly personal manner, and both have documented the queer scene in New York and Sydney, respectively. One key difference is Yang’s unique combination of photography and written passages, which he inscribes directly onto the images. The text enables the nuances of his personal life — his feelings, thoughts and observations — as well as his social context, to be clearly communicated. For example, Yang annotates his self-portrait Life Lines #11 – William in scholar’s costume (1984) 1984/2009 with a humorous explanatory text that arches above his gloriously ornate, orange scholar headdress: I learned Taoism, a Chinese philosophy, and this led to me embracing my Chinese heritage which hitherto had been denied and unacknowledged. People at the time called me Born Again Chinese, and that’s not a bad description as there was a certain zealousness to the process. But now I see it as a liberation from racial suppression and prefer to say I came out as a Chinese. The wry commentary here about the embrace of Chinese identity might distract from the registration of shame, along with its evident overcoming. The suppression of identity — whether racial, ethnic, religious or sexual — is a shame response. In my own family history, just like Yang’s, there were also efforts to suppress ethnicity. My grandparents hid my Polish–Jewish heritage, while their somewhat ludicrous choice of a family surname allowed me to ‘pass’ in postwar society. Acts of concealment and attempts to minimise differences are extremely common migrant experiences. I learned Taoism, a Chinese philosophy, and this led to me embracing my Chinese heritage which hitherto had been denied and unacknowledged. People at the time called me Born Again Chinese, and that’s not a bad description as there was a certain zealousness to the process. But now I see it as a liberation from racial suppression and prefer to say I came out as a Chinese. Life Lines #11 – William in scholar’s costume (1984) 46 WILLIAM YANG 1984/2009 In the series ‘My Uncle’s Murder’ 2008, Yang speculates about how the murder of his Uncle William Fang Yuen in Mourilyan in north Queensland may have contributed to the repression of identity in his family. Below an image of his mother’s signed testimony from the murder trial, he writes: My mother gave evidence at the trial and it shocked me to see my mother’s signature on the transcript because she’d never told me. I think this event was very traumatic for my mother and she put it out of her mind completely. She literally blotted it out. I feel the legacy of this murder came down to me in that, while I was growing up, my ethnicity was supressed. Although Yang doesn’t use the word ‘shame’ here, it is this affect that best accounts for the wholesale sense of wrongness about the self which produces these kinds of evasions. The way in which shame colours self-perception is best explained through a comparison with guilt. Guilt is triggered by something we have actually done, whereas shame is more self-reflexive: we feel bad about ourselves, or our ethnicity, sexual orientation or country of origen. Guilt does not necessarily rebound on the sense of self as a whole — it is more piecemeal in character, limited to specific acts or omissions. Such limits do not operate with shame. Hence, American psychologist Silvan Tomkins avows that of all the negative affects, it is shame that ‘strikes deepest into the heart of man’.1 Usually, we break contact when we are shamed: literally or metaphorically looking down, blushing or flushed with shame. For queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, a key interpreter of Tomkins, pain and volatility are the leitmotifs of shame. Shame causes a double movement, which she describes as proceeding in seemingly contradictory directions: ‘toward painful individuation, toward uncontrollable relationality’.2 Separation from others is coupled with the feeling of being exposed to the disapproving gaze of potentially countless others. Put simply, the painful inward turn is also a turn outward, but it is this outward turn, if uncontrollable, that results in a difficulty to determine, or limit, just whose regard might cause shame. These descriptions of shame revolve around visibility: looking down, not seeing, feeling excruciatingly visible, and being the subject of a disapproving gaze. How apt, then, to use sight and the celebration of visibility to overturn self-consciousness and embarrassment about identity. In many of Yang’s selfportraits, there is the quiet assertion of confidence in his Chinese identity. For example, in the text of Climbing Huang Shan 2005, despite his self-deprecating humour, Yang nonetheless acknowledges his identification with being Chinese. He writes: There’s a saying that every Chinese should climb Huang Shan, the Yellow Mountain, before they die. Although I carry on about China being impenetrable to me, I guess I identified strongly enough with being Chinese to go on a pilgrimage to China in 2005 to climb some of the sacred mountains, among them, Huang Shan. My mother gave evidence at the trial and it shocked me to see my mother’s signature on the transcript because she’d never told me. I think this event was very traumatic for my mother and she put it out of her mind completely. She literally blotted it out. I feel the legacy of this murder came down to me in that, while I was growing up, my ethnicity was suppressed. My Mother’s Signature. Photographer unknown 48 WILLIAM YANG (from 'My Uncle’s Murder' portfolio) 2008 WILLIAM YANG: SHAME & SHAMELESSNESS 49 In this image, Yang locates himself in the midst of a misty landscape, integrated like a large inky mountain or outcrop. Yet he also seems superimposed, floating on top of the mountains — a rather fitting spatial ambiguity given his necessarily hybrid Australian–Chinese identity. This disjuncture between body and environment recurs in other self-portraits, and is most evident in his Copy of hand-coloured publicity photo for ‘The North’. Large photo of William by Sandy Edwards. 1996, where images of Yang, both as a child and an adult, are placed over the top of dry desert country with no attempt at integration. Even his photograph Life Lines #11 – William in scholar’s costume (1984) has a slightly awkward, off-centred manner, despite the seemingly celebratory tone. However, this tension between body and background does not seem to be present in the artist’s photographs of others. His images of the male body, in particular, suggest a loving queer eye, rather than the internalised eye of the homophobe. Pride successfully displaces shame. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick saw shame as damaging, but also as capable of being pressed into the service of transformation, as she once proposed: ‘I suggest that to view performativity in terms of habitual shame and its transformation opens a lot of new doors for thinking about identity politics’.3 This habitual shame is an issue for identity politics, and for art and literature, because oppressed minorities must navigate damaging identities that have been forged by others. To transform this feeling, then, has a particular urgency. However, Sedgwick does not spell out a general strategy for transforming shame. Her close reading of American novelist Henry James, which occasions the analysis of shame, traces the homoerotic imagery of his work as simultaneously blushing, but also revealing. In particular, she focuses on the way in which sources of shame in the writer’s past were reworked, rather than repudiated, particularly when James edited the New York edition of his collected fiction. In other words, like Yang, James revisited past experiences of shame and presented them in ways that integrated those experiences, making them ‘performatively productive’ to use Sedgwick’s terms.4 While Yang often uses humour in this transformative fashion, in James’s case, what had once been tainted by the flush of shame was now presented with ‘an affecting and eroticized form’, according to Sedgwick.5 In the complex placement of text in Yang’s photographs of men, there is a similar affecting and eroticised form of display. Sometimes the text snakes along the contours of the body like a caress (Darrin and Linden. Part 3 1991), while at other times, the text covers the whole expanse of an exposed back, like the seduction presented in The Story of Joe 1979/2020. My favourite is Imagining Caravaggio 2012, where the text is carefully confined to the black briefs of the very beautiful ‘portrait sitter’ (he actually lounges), who reminds Yang of the Italian Renaissance painter Caravaggio. In this work, Yang highlights youthful perfection by contrasting golden flesh against a velvety black background, which is highly reminiscent of the dramatic portraits of the Italian master. There’s a saying that every Chinese should climb Huang Shan, the Yellow Mountain, before they die. Although I carry on about China being impenetrable to me, I guess I identified strongly enough with being Chinese to go on a pilgrimage to China in 2005 to climb some of the sacred mountains, among them, Huang Shan. Climbing Huang Shan 2005 PAGES 52–3 They showed me a Herb Ritts photo that they liked. The two men in it were in a stylised pose and they were naked. Could I do for them something like that? I explained I couldn’t reproduce the pose as that would be too difficult, moreover it was imitation, but I got the idea of what they wanted. They wanted sexy shots but they wanted them artistic. Definitely nothing pornographic. You see, they were madly in love. 50 WILLIAM YANG Darrin and Linden. Part 3 1991 WILLIAM YANG: SHAME & SHAMELESSNESS 51 Not all of the men in Yang’s portraits conform to stereotypes of male beauty, though, and the joint portrait of middle-aged couple Geoff and Joe 2007 is an example. Yang photographs these two heavy-set, and heavily tattooed, men amidst the clutter of their bedroom, the bedside table spilling over with books. Both look out at the camera unsmilingly; however, their gaze is also welcoming, and their conjoined bodies curve to form a horseshoe-shape that opens out towards the viewer. While their bright tattoos clash with the bedsheets and the highly patterned wallpaper, they appear languidly sensual. Yang’s handwritten text sits unobtrusively above the bedhead: ‘I’d known them for years, photographing them around the traps, but never in their home’. The somewhat easy and matter-of-fact approach to gay identity in these images contrasts with the artist’s humour and hesitancy about his Chinese identity. Arguably, for William Yang, invisible sexual identity is easily presented, while the visible one is more troublesome. And perhaps what Yang’s inversion allows is a much more complicated picture of the intersecting components of contemporary identity in our ever-changing world. ENDNOTES I’d known them for years, photographing them around the traps, but never in their home. 54 WILLIAM YANG Geoff and Joe 2007 1 Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Vol. II: The Negative Affects, Springer Publishing Company, New York, 1963, p.118. 2 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Shame, theatricality, and queer performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press, Durham, NC, 2003, p.37. 3 4 5 Sedgwick, p.62. Sedgwick, p.44. Sedgwick, p.44. WILLIAM YANG: SHAME & SHAMELESSNESS 55