Jade Yumang is a Chicago-based artist who explores the concept of queer form through abstract installations, performances, and sculptures. He says that the crux of a lot of the work that he does revolves around what queer form looks like.
“It’s usually kinda exercised through a lot of archival work, looking at the historiography of how history has been written and what’s kinda swept under the rug,” he says. “I guess what I’m looking for is what’s under that rug in relation to queer history.”
Since his graduation from Parsons School of Design in 2012, Yumang has worked closely with Sara Jimenez as the collaborative team Tatlo. Together they primarily do endurance performances designed to express the ideas of, according to their site, “cultural expectations, personal experiences, systems of restraints, and bodily fatigue.” Recently, Yumang says, collaborating has been challenging, since Jimenez is living and working in New York.
“It’s always good to push ideas against someone else and have that back and forth,” says Yumang. “Again, we do a lot of physical things together, but it’s hard when we try to share ideas via phone or through an email; we’re better when we’re body to body.”
It would make sense to expect that Yumang has faced some adversity working within these often-controversial themes. What is surprising, however, is that he met that adversity the most just across the water from us.
“I was given this show in Vancouver, and then a week before the opening the gallery had to close down my show because of the content of the sexually explicit work that I was doing at that time,” he says. “This was in Vancouver! And, you know, I was young, and I didn’t know any better. I mean, there was a whole hoopla about it, but I found out that one of the board directors just did not agree with my work. I guess I became more of a recluse in Vancouver in terms of the work that I was doing. I just took a chance in terms of applying for grad school in New York; I got there, and it’s really opened up a different way of looking at queerness for me.”
Yumang will be giving a talk at Camosun on a recent series of sculptures based on a 1966 issue of the radical gay publication Drum. (Drum’s founder, Clark Polak, was arrested in 1969 and later died by suicide.)
“Each page from this particular issue was digitally scanned and then printed on cotton and then cut, pieced, quilted, and then turned into sculptures with contemporary materials from that era,” says Yumang.
Yumang is now an assistant professor in the department of Fiber and Material Studies at the Art Institute of Chicago. He says that this role allows him to interact with a younger generation of queer youth and that he recognizes their struggle.
“Always just focus on the work and even if you feel like you’re doing it on your own or you’re alone there’s always a group of people sharing a similar perspective as you—find those people,” he says. “You just can’t really completely settle because your lives are always going to be questioned, and you have to be vigilant, but at the same time also try to have fun.”
Camosun Visual Arts Visiting Artist Lecture Series
Jade Yumang
2 pm Wednesday, November 27
Free, Fisher 100, Lansdowne
camosun.ca