Walking into the main gallery at the Monterey Museum of Art, patrons are immediately aware of the hush in the room, partially because of the culture of taking in an art exhibition in reverent silence, looking. Yet in this case, the legendary Joseph Yang’s watercolor paintings, revealing a sensitivity for his native culture and the Chinese landscape where it played out, are soft, layered with detail, memories, meaning. Paired with his paintings are works by his daughter, Belle Yang, who leans into a bright palette, introducing more color, more movement, more joy.

Their work is different yet complementary, representing who they are and what they’ve experienced in life, through the context of their artistry. Those who knew Joseph Yang (1928-2019) in life, found him a quiet, measured man, possessed of a strong spine and soft, if armored heart.

Belle Yang, too, seems quiet, serene, reserved, still. The kind of person who listens well and speaks softly, with spare yet well-chosen words and only when she has something to say. Yet, through her work, the artist and author present a kaleidoscope of color and meaning, inviting her audience to lean in, listen, pay attention to the message in her composition or her words. She, herself, is a tapestry woven of a diversity of life experiences, affected by but never victim to her circumstances and, in and through it all, very much her own self. It shows in her writing, in her ability to paint with words and her capacity to paint storyline into her canvases.

Yang was born in 1960 into an unkind era in Taiwan, where a typhoon ransomed the roof of her small home, where snakes crawled under her bed, where dinner was scant, but love was abundant. By the time she was 4 years old, her father, Joseph Yang, who had served as a dean at Yuying University in Tokyo, received clearance to leave his homeland, then under the rule of Chiang Kai-shek, to pursue a Ph.D. program in international relations at Meiji University in Tokyo.

A year later, once her mother, Laning Yang, was hired as an editor of a Chinese magazine based in Tokyo, Yang and her mom were able to reunite with her father. Yet, by 1967, shortly after her father’s Ph.D. program had ended upon the death of his professor, the American immigration law was liberalized under the Hart-Cellar Act, enabling the Yangs to seek freedom from centuries of cultural assault and begin a new life in San Francisco. There, he found freedom for his family but lost his voice.

The family learned to speak English, Americanized their names and, in 1971, celebrated their American citizenship in a city by the sea, where Joseph Yang opened a Carmel art gallery. It would be years, punctuated by many twists and turns in a road paved by both artistic talent and trauma, before Belle Yang would be able to define an authentic sense of freedom. And then both paint and write about it.

Since Sept. 12 and running through Nov. 24, Monterey Museum of Art presents, “Imagining China: The Art of Belle Yang and Joseph Yang.”

In addition to a foreword by Executive Director Corey Madden — about an exhibition that “explores the powerful influence that father and daughter had on each other’s creativity” —and an interview with Belle Yang by guest curator, artist Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Ph.D. — “At the beginning, the father was the mentor, but as Belle Yang grew as an artist after her art training in China, she inspired her father” — the exhibit catalog features “By the Grace of Sorrow, an essay by Belle Yang.”

“This winter, the cymbidiums are late in sending forth spears of flowers,” Yang wrote. “The pristine tufts of rain clouds floating in the creases of the hills of Carmel Valley are why my father, Joseph Yang, who died five years ago, named our home ‘Deep in White Cloud.’ I benefitted from his mentoring for 59 years.

“ Laning Yang, my bodhisattva of a mother, gave me two additional years of company. … It is commonly said that you do not truly become an adult until you lose your parents. Now, without a single person left to worry or embarrass, I can be honest to the bone.”

Setting intention

Yang believed she would become a doctor because her parents had set the intention. Yet, while traveling throughout Europe during her junior year at UC Santa Cruz, she extracted the physiology tome she was toting at the bottom of her backpack in case she had the time or the inclination to study, and abandoned it somewhere between Morocco and Spain. It was the beauty of the landscape, the inspiration of art, the power of visual expression that stirred her soul. Surely her father would understand that.

Yang completed her degree at UC Santa Cruz and then further allowed her artistic sensibilities and intentions to emerge. She went on to study at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and then returned to Carmel, where all her father had sought to protect and provide by coming to America was threatened by one man. A chance encounter for his daughter had turned into a relationship gone wrong as he became her stalker. In an attempt to escape burglary, violence, fear, isolation, Yang returned to China to study art. Three years later, after witnessing violence and atrocity on a much larger scale at Tiananmen Square, she came home to Carmel.

It made sense that Yang would come home from her experiences in China sick, completely spent. It didn’t make sense when she was diagnosed with AIDS.

For nearly 20 years, whenever she was interviewed about her artwork or her writing, she didn’t divulge that she had AIDS. The topic was too loaded, too stigmatized, too frightening, too judged. Unlike COVID, where medication and a vaccine were so quickly created, AIDS was, at the time, unresolved. Yang didn’t want to be known as “The AIDS Artist” but for the work, itself. Three times, she nearly died. And still very few people knew, and still, her parents worked feverishly to save their only child.

This, too shall strengthen

Today, Belle Yang manages both her health and her art career well. She talks about the life she has lived on two continents, with two devoted parents, and her tandem career as an author and an artist.

“I am not an AIDS artist,” she said. “I am an artist who has overcome the disease now controlled as a chronic illness. I live a content, productive life, where the AIDS is under control and I am painting with abandon. Through the help of my doctors and my parents, I survived AIDS, enabling me to take care of my parents and give them a very good death.”

Unlike previous decades when the AIDS epidemic was neither understood nor controlled, today Yang is open to talking about AIDS, always aware, if we don’t put a face on it, the disease remains nefarious, misunderstood, veiled. The more light we shine on such a topic, she said, the more society learns, understands and deals with it.

“Belle, the author of three acclaimed novels — one graphic — plus nine children’s books, including ‘Hannah Is My Name,’ her classic immigration story from a child’s point of view, may well be the America’s greatest combination of writer-artist,” said gallerist Steve Hauk, who represents Yang’s work at Hauk Fine Art in Pacific Grove. “Artistically, her mastery of gouache and watercolor bring her universal themes, from both sides of the Pacific, to vivid life. It has been a privilege to represent her work all these years and now. Joseph Yang’s, too.”

The Monterey Museum of Art exhibition, “Imagining China: The Art of Belle Yang and Joseph Yang,” runs through Nov. 24.