Royce W. Smith

Modern and Contemporary Art History

Institution: School of Art and Design, College of Fine Arts, Wichita State University

Estados Unidos

The challenges inherent in art exhibitions engaging HIV/AIDS is the achievement of balance between their revelation about individual artists’ responses to disease, their affirmation of those varying perspectives, and their avoidance of slippage into visual cliché. Given the scope of exhibitions devoted to tackling HIV/AIDS from either aesthetic or activist viewpoints, an exhibition “about” HIV/AIDS is neither a simple, photographic confirmation of epidemiological “horror” nor an unchanging canon of artworks that can construct and exhibit disease in a totalizing, universalizing manner. Some works, like the manifestation of the illness itself, function in an extremely clandestine manner and reiterate visually that an exhibition about HIV/AIDS is not one with visible “truths” or predictable visual vocabularies, but rather is epitomized by varying negotiations between disease and its broader preconceived, developing, and experienced configurations within and between cultures. Given the biomedical and cultural imperatives that all too often fashion HIV/AIDS as a homogeneously experienced catastrophe, art remains a crucial mediator between the disease’s global reach and its local, often-unfamiliar surfacings. While many photographers, such as Nicholas Nixon in his “People with AIDS” series, have tended to focus on HIV/AIDS as indexical presences in their work and have ultimately isolated the disease—as well as those who live with it—from their extensive cultural and social contexts, William Yang's "Sadness" serves as a poignant mapping of the complex intersections between art, sexual identity, cultural heritage, and contemporary life with HIV/AIDS.

First created in 1992 and performed as a monologue with accompanying photography and music, William Yang’s "Sadness" aligns his experiences as a third-generation Chinese-Australian and the rigid traditions of his family with the queer community in Sydney to which Yang belongs and the devastation caused by the pandemic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. While the two unresolved narratives that simultaneously develop in "Sadness"—the 1922 murder of Yang’s uncle, William Fang Yuen, and the historical affirmation of a culture ravaged by the spread of HIV—might seem disparate and unrelated, "Sadness" convincingly intersperses Yang’s personal quest for knowledge about family and self-identity with his desire to photographically and textually memorialize friends who have died from complications of AIDS. For example, as Yang recalls his mother’s desire to embrace Westernness and her assimilationist stance that left questions about his Chinese history unanswered, the artist importantly links the self-denial perpetuated by colonialism with the ongoing marginalization of those living in Australia’s queer communities in the 1980s and 1990s—especially those living with HIV/AIDS.

This paper will present and explore the significance of specific narratives and photographic projects associated with "Sadness," especially Yang’s evolving photodocumentary relationship with Peter Tully and fellow artist, David McDiarmid. Yang’s "Sadness" will also be cross-culturally contextualized with other AIDS-related art projects by artists more familiar in Western art historical and cultural discourses—such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Andres Serrano, Nan Goldin, Martin Wong, and David Wojnarowicz—in order to examine the importance of Yang’s work within the landscape of art practices addressing the impacts of HIV/AIDS.

About Royce W. Smith