Past Exhibitions

Imagining China: The Art of Belle Yang and Joseph Yang explores the powerful creative relationship between a father and daughter by assembling a selection of artworks, illustrations, and graphic novel panels that draw from their lived experience and shared memories. Together, the art of Belle Yang and her father Joseph Yang invites the viewer to accompany the artists on their visual journeys through China in the context of wars and political upheavals, their emotional growth in overcoming fear, and their mutual evolution as landscape painters. Curated by Oakland-based artist and scholar, Lydia Nakashima Degarrod, Imagining China uncovers how Belle and her father Joseph, both accomplished artists, found solace, resilience, and ultimately joy and deep satisfaction in creating art together.

About the Artists

Belle Yang

Belle Yang was born in Taiwan in 1960 and lives in Carmel, CA. Her many artistic influences include growing up as a first-generation Chinese American, studying pre-med locally at UC-Santa Cruz before finishing at ArtCenter College of Design in Southern California, becoming a successful graphic novelist, and finally, studying classical Chinese painting in China. Father and daughter worked side by side at their home, each one providing both inspiration and painting techniques to one and another. Belle has shared that "Joseph Yang was my mentor throughout his life, and even now from the afterlife. For both of us, creativity is the reason we are on this Earth."

Joseph Yang

Born in in 1928 in Xinmin, Liaoning Province, China, Joseph Yang was an established poet and a painter, who bore witness to the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, Japanese colonization, the Soviet invasion, and finally the Communist takeover. As a member of the scholar class, he fled to Taiwan after World War II. Joseph, his wife, Laning, and their only child Belle immigrated to the US in 1967, settling in Carmel, California in 1971 to a home he named Deep in White Cloud. It is where Belle Yang still lives and works today. 

Support for this exhibition provided by Belle Yang, Hauk Fine Arts, and Lila and James Thorsen

Image: Belle Yang (b. 1960), Untitled (Granddaddy Hill), 1997, gouache and pencil on paper, 22 x 28 in. Courtesy of the Yang Collection. © Belle Yang