The first gallery in Full Light and Perfect Shadow: The Photography of Chao-Chen Yang opens not with photography but drawing. Though no connection is made between the numerous charcoal figure studies and portraits that line the walls and Yang’s later photographs, close-looking reveals the persistence of drawing throughout Yang’s photographic corpus and reveals an artist motivated not by light and shadow but rather preoccupied with reinscribing line and color into photography’s granular silver surface.
Organized by David F. Martin at the Cascadia Art Museum Full Light and Perfect Shadow offers visitors an opportunity to engage with the full breadth of the career of a nearly forgotten artist. The first survey of the career of twentieth-century Seattle artist Chao-Chen Yang (1909–1969), Full Light and Perfect Shadow is a signal contribution to the rich and underexplored history of Seattle’s regional modernist art scene and an important, if inchoate, contribution to global histories of photography.
In Morning Tide (ca. 1940–42), a saccharine scene of a nude figure wading in the sea, Yang has heightened the image’s pictorial impact through carefully drawn interventions along cresting waves and the figure’s form. Thus altered, the print is a uniquely combinatory work, one possessed of both photography’s instantaneity and drawing’s durational encounter.
In Apprehension (ca. 1949–50), the exhibition’s lead advertising image, drawing and duration recur as central interests. Suffused with orange light, this close-in image of a young man vibrates with a chromatic intensity that amplifies the figure’s alarmed expression. Though this work could easily be read as a conventional color photograph, it was made from a black and white negative with the short-lived, Kodak-patented color process, Flexichrome. Similar to hand-coloring, the process gave artists the ability to retrospectively select their palette while also affording greater accuracy and realism. This color image, then, was not simply made mechanically but through Yang’s extensive manual application of dye to a gelatin surface uniquely readied by the Flexichrome process.
Yang’s fixation with mark-making is evident in Spotting (1939). The strikingly modernist scene is among the least manipulated of the prints on view. The image itself, which depicts a worker standing on a suspended scaffold patching the surface of an industrial structure, echoes Constructivist photographs, like those by László Moholy-Nagy in its use of a radically oblique perspective. The title nods toward the technique of “spotting,” in which photographers correct minor imperfections on gelatin silver prints through careful application of dye on their surface with a fine-pointed brush. In embracing the aesthetic concerns of “straight photography,” an approach that rejected manipulation of the print, to photograph a scene of industrial-scale “spotting,” Yang creates a play between text and image that satirizes straight photography. Increasingly dominant at the time, adherents of straight photography condemned pictorialist approaches that embraced painterly technique, all while holding onto myriad forms of manipulation into the image, like spotting, so long as they concealed their own traces.
As Yang’s early training in drawing and painting shapes his approach to his photographic prints, the classical Chinese education he received early in life is also present in these works. In Roaming Pair (ca. 1940), two ducks float along a lake framed by hanging willow branches. The image takes up two common motifs in early Chinese painting and poetry: mandarin ducks and willows. A pair of mandarin ducks stands for enduring love, while willows symbolize the grief of separation. In one reading, viewers might rightly situate the image in relation to idyllic nature scenes popular with North American camera pictorialists. At the same time, however, it can also be read as an allusion to Yang’s own experience of dislocation. Made against the backdrop of the Second Sino-Japanese War, a cataclysm in which Yang’s young daughter died, the photograph might function as an encoded evocation of grief and testament to the endurance of Yang and his wife Jean and their life together away from home.
A major contribution to the rich and underexplored history of Seattle’s regional art scene for its important recuperative contribution, the full promise of Full Light and Perfect Shadow, however, largely remains undeveloped. Where they are present, interpretative texts dwell on technical aspects or present outdated, inaccurate, or incorrect information. Comparative works or critical engagement might have served to enrich and clarify visitors’ experiences. Positioning Yang with respect to the Chinese intellectual milieu from which he emerged, the rich aesthetic debates of the North American camera clubs and publications with which he engaged, or with reference to his local contemporaries would have been illuminating.
Equally, it is regrettable that the exhibition’s organizers made no substantial attempt to address the complicated issues of class, race, and nationality that shaped Yang’s lived reality. The beneficiary of an elite education and consul to a well-regarded foreign government, Yang’s experience doubtlessly diverged from other Asian immigrants to the region at the time; his unique positionality merits closer concern. I wonder, as well, how discussion of local or global events might have aided the viewer in understanding the circumstances of Yang’s own life? Was Yang touched by the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act? Impacted by the unfolding horrors of Japanese internment? And what of the retreat of the Chinese Nationalist government to Taiwan—and with it the loss of his home, Hangzhou, to a government that was not his own? Instead, we are left to bring our own disparate knowledge of the historical period traversed by Yang’s life to bear on his images.
Uneven as it may be in some respects, Full Light and Perfect Shadow, is uniquely important among recent regional exhibitions for its role in intervening to secure a history likely destined to become little more than a silence in the archive. If, as Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes in Silencing the Past (1995), future narratives of history are shaped by the materiality of the historical process, then the Cascadia Art Museum plays an outsize role in the area for its commitment to recovering local artistic legacies—a role largely abandoned by the region’s other collecting institutions. In taking seriously regional historic artists, figures like Chao-Chen Yang, the Cascadia Art Museum not only uncovers a dynamic and global past that prefigures our present but meaningfully opens new possible futures.
Chao Chen Yang: Full Light and Perfect Shadow: The Photography of Chao-Chen Yang
Cascadia Art Museum, Edmonds, WA
November 8, 2023 to February 11, 2024