Reposted with permission from The Ubyssey.

On the screen, a timelapse projection shows Jade Yumang smiling. Over the course of a year, they practiced holding that smile for an hour at a time to document the point at which it turns grotesque. As the image shifts, the smile is ruptured by the hammering of nails into the drywall where it’s projected.

This is part of Yumang’s Shut Up and Smile, which they performed at the SUPERNOVA Performance Art Festival in 2013. It was one of several works they showcased during their artist in residence talk at Green College on February 4. Yumang said that, with Shut Up and Smile, they wanted to “try to break it down literally and figuratively to see the decay of the surface.”

Yumang is artist in residence for the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at UBC from February to March 2026. The talk is part of that residency, during which Yumang will be based at the Audain Art Centre, working in-studio, visiting classes, and touring student studios. A UBC BFA alum, they earned their MFA with honours from Parsons School of Design in 2012. They’re now an associate professor in the department of fibre and material studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

In the talk at Green College, they said their art explores frameworks of queer form as a method of cultural inquiry and aesthetic expression. Their conception of queer form originates from French surreal theorist Georges Bataille’s Formless, which examines the destabilization of form. If form provides rubric for understanding and producing art, Bataille’s formlessness provides a way of “transgressing how we define and visualize things,” said Yumang.

This conception of formlessness was later codified by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E Krauss in their book, Formless: A User’s Guide. To Bois and Krauss, “formless” cannot be easily classified. Rather, it is unstable and has an operational existence, meaning it is defined by how artists use it.

In 2017, ASAP Journal released a special issue called “Queer Form” which connected formlessness to queer aesthetics. The work in this issue was seminal for Yumang’s thought on form. “I equate ‘formless’ as abstraction, which gives queer form a visual vehicle,” they said.

Yumang’s Thumb Through, a series of 32 sculptures, explores form and formlessness in relation to desire and obscenity. The series was inspired by My-O-My, a gay erotic magazine that was part of a New Jersey legal scandal in 1972. Law enforcement seized copies of this magazine, among other paraphernalia deemed obscene, from a bookstore owned by Edward Shapiro and Milton Nerenberg. The magazine issues were permanently confiscated, and the state called them dangerous, comparing them to a “loaded gun.”

Yumang printed photos from the magazine on cotton fabric and sewed them into sculptures embellished with textiles, buttons and pins from the era. Each sculpture is made up of a cotton and felt base, with the repetitive, rolled shapes bunched together on top to create an abstract structure.

In these sculptures, Yumang uses a variety of material—textiles from baseball caps, knitted ribbing used for sweater sleeve cuffs and necklines, “mesh to cool the body, zippers to close or release the body, woven wool to warm the body.” In Yumang’s words, the materials recall the “initial desires of touch intended by the magazine and extracts it away from the fears imposed by the state.”

The intimacy and adaptability in Yumang’s work, expressed through textiles and touch, reflects a lifelong negotiation with movement, displacement and the performance of queerness. Growing up in Quezon City, Philippines, their early life was shaped by the legacy of their parents, who were active in the People Power Revolution of 1986 that overthrew Ferdinand Marcos.

Amid political and economic instability, their parents sought financial security abroad, relocating the family to Dubai. War continued to be a backdrop for them due to the UAE’s involvement in the 90’s Gulf War. Later, relocating to Vancouver gave Yumang the space to explore their queerness, and their performance of it across different contexts—from places where queerness is suppressed or criminalized, to a society where they are protected. This experience, combined with a life of constant movement, continues to shape their art.

Yumang, now recognized internationally, traces the origins of their practice to Vancouver and UBC. Their “identity as an artist really formed here,” they said during the talk, when they were an undergraduate in the early 2000’s. “I remember taking my first art history and studio class, and felt right away that this is where I should be.”

Even so, Yumang’s practice is shaped by a sense of never being fully rooted in one place or identity. A through line of queerness runs across different stages of their life and work, marked by a continual need to adapt in order to belong. The constant departure from one origin to the next—both physically and in identity—is reflected in how they think and work as an artist.

Yumang’s work is shaped by repetition and the continual negotiation of movement, identity, and queerness. These gestures, accumulated over time, transform experiences of adaptation into art that is conceptually rigorous and intimate. This is the ritual that they use to embody the queer form. In the talk, they quoted anthropologist and queer theorist Martin F Manalansan: “In a world where identity is not rooted or territorialized within a specific place, rituals become the signs at the crossroads.”

Currently, Yumang is researching Filipino talismanic vests, sometimes referred to as anting-anting, with the intention of replacing the original imagery and text with Swardspeak, an emergent cant language used by some queer Filipinos. They are “eager to experiment with weaving and other fibre techniques as a way to explore text, textile and texture.”

Jenni Nguyen, author; first posted in The Ubyssey, February 14, 2026: Jade Yumang talks form and formlessness at Green College; reposted with permission and gratitude to The Ubyssey.

Jade Yumang was born in Quezon City, Philippines, grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, immigrated to unceded Coast Salish territories in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and has been most recently living in the traditional unceded homelands of the Council of the Three Fires in Chicago, IL. They have exhibited their work in several museums and galleries nationally and internationally. Yumang has received grants from the Illinois Arts Council, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the BC Arts Council. He has been an artist in residence at the Fire Island Artist Residency, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space Residency, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. They earned an MFA with Departmental Honors from Parsons School of Design in 2012 and a BFA with Honours from the University of British Columbia in 2008. Yumang is an associate professor in the Department of Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

This visit has been co-organized with the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, which is hosting Yumang as their 2026 artist in residence.  Yumang will be in residence at both sites through February and March 2026.