By Barrett White
Jade Yumang grew up as free a spirit as they come. Bouncing around his mother’s beauty salon in the Philippines while his father worked overseas, Yumang was allowed to be as openly himself as he wanted. The majority of his mother’s friends and salon coworkers were queer and, for a young boy and budding artist discovering himself, this environment was more than favorable for his personal growth.
At age seven, Yumang and his family moved to Dubai to join his father where he worked—a cultural shift that gripped his teens, swinging the metronome from one extreme to another. “I learned how to speak English [at my mother’s beauty shop] with the gay lingo, and then when I moved to Dubai, where it’s still illegal to be gay, it really transformed me,” Yumang says. “When I lived there, I was very strict with myself. Then we moved to Vancouver, where I came out at about age 19.”
Growing up a globetrotter, Yumang landed in New York City for graduate school, “which I believe transformed my queerness yet again,” he says.
In 2014, Yumang found himself stuck in a rut. He found himself back in Vancouver at his mother’s house, watching Laura, the 1944 romantic drama directed by Otto Preminger. He had seen the film as a child and had always been drawn to the villain, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), but couldn’t place his finger on why. Watching it as an adult, it was clear as Technicolor. “He was so flamingly queer!” Yumang laughs. “I was obsessed. I reread the book that the film was based on, I watched other film noir, and I started to notice all of these other film noir characters with great queer subtext.”
Yumang’s interest in queer representation in film noir birthed In the Shadows, an installation comprised of sculpture, textile, and video, to be presented by Art League Houston. In the Shadows considers how film noir is constructed stylistically and narratively to disorient the audience to generate a level of uncertainty and deception, not just in its story arc, but more so on how queer characters implicitly and explicitly surface. “My work primarily focuses on the concept of queer form,” Yumang says. “I use a variety of techniques to convey notions of phenomenology, affect, and ‘queer’ as a process—as a verb rather than a quality.”
Jacqueline 2 (The Seventh Victim), 2018. Serigraphed devoré on satin, acrylic on oak, cloth covered cord, light bulb, silk, and cotton thread.
Employing multiple dimensions of costuming, lighting, and the queer affect, the installation in Art League Houston’s main gallery features a series of effigies of queer characters that emerged and navigated the strict Hays Code in Hollywood. Additionally, the installation includes a looped video projection featuring clips from eight films that have been configured to only depict the scenes in which queer characters are represented.
Most of the characters’ sexualities in the films are formulated through crime scenarios where gay men are portrayed as deviant dandies and lesbians as menacing sadists. These depictions, although contemporarily outdated, were important at that time, as these queer characters seep through the shadows, glare at the instability of heterosexuality, and act as a harbinger for the LGBTQ rights movement in the 1960s. “It juxtaposes the ‘femme fatale’ and the ‘male detective,’” Yumang says. “And just like in Laura, Waldo Lydecker is right in the middle of that.”
What: In the Shadows by Jade Yumang
When: January 26–March 9, 2019
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 26, 2019, 6–9 p.m.
Artist Talk: 6:30 p.m. | Main Gallery
Details: artleaguehouston.org/upcoming-exhibitions
