It may be impossible to present a slideshow of a trip abroad without coming off like a tourist. All the same, I can’t write about William Yang’s “China” without repeating the praise that has been voiced elsewhere. This is a slideshow you have to see.
The format is deceptively simple: two images projected side by side, a storyteller, and the boldly virtuosic, sparsely deployed music of Nicholas Ng, who plays several traditional Chinese instruments. Yang brings such warmth and wry wonder to the stage that the first reaction is to forget he is performing. He tells us a story of his journeys to China, which are also journeys into his family’s past, and these journeys seem to be windows offering insight into the man William Yang. But in fact these windows are more like frames that draw us in only to project us beyond him into the world he sees. Yang himself remains elusive: standing at the center of the stage, his voice bringing him palpably near, he becomes a lens that shows but does not show itself. To see Yang is to see his point of view as it refracts into memories, images, and faces. To me, this subtle feat is what makes Yang’s work so distinctive.
Yang does appear in the images we see, but this is the crux of the performance: we cannot see him without seeing the roles he becomes to those he encounters. Listing them here won’t spoil the performance because the rituals of each role acquire unique personalities with each encounter. Yang is the traveler on an inner journey. He is tour-guide, tourist, and journalist. He is the foreign visitor and honored guest, the displaced native son, the mentor and respected elder, and the eager young boy who must be taught to bow. He is also the gay man who forces generation conflicts into the open, and who finds a similar sense of pride in Sydney drag queens and his straight travel companion – a student at a military academy who has donned the robes of the Manchu Emperors. It is here that Yang also assumes the guise of the proud parent, which can be seen as figuring his role as the artist who has created and nurtured – rather than objectively recorded or captured – these characters. Each role constitutes a genre of performance, and these genres explode the even simplicity of Yang’s presence, voice, and camera.
This poise anchors a poem the same way that the Chinese script anchors one shared cultural heritage across time and China’s vast geography. Each role that Yang plays comes equipped with rituals of hospitality and friendship – scripts in their own way – that can also be the cause of conflict. Though Yang doesn’t invent these rituals anew, he does reveal them to be products of education, one of the work’s most prominent themes (another is feasting). Education figures as a way of rising up out of a common world, but it can also require leaving worlds behind. Perhaps this is the underlying metaphor for Yang’s view of China, its industrial power and its rising middle class? And for China’s view of its own ancient traditions and its encounter with Yang, the traveler from the “West” who has returned to ascend its holy mountains? But these images, too, are balanced by others. For me, this was the singing of the three boys who helped Yang during one of his ascents. This is – if I remember correctly – the only native Chinese we hear during the performance, the only recording of Chinese voices, and I understood this moment together with Nicholas Ng’s music as counterweights to Yang’s own narrative. Like the images, they also pull the center of gravity away from Yang himself, transforming his voice into another kind of lens by underscoring its subjectivity – and its limitations (Yang speaks hardly any Chinese). The work has an image for this transformation: the copy of the Chinese bell that Yang rings three times (though we only hear it twice?), unobserved, we are pointedly told, by any guards. Obviously this marks a seminal moment in Yang’s narrative, which I impulsively felt to be bordering on kitsch. On reflection, I think this is a judgment the work cannot help but provoke, but which also represents a mistake – a naïve framework for understanding Yang’s identity – that “China” vigorously attempts to forestall.
Michael Thomas Taylor
Assistant Professor of German
The University of Calgary
www.michaeltaylor.de
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