Stefani Echeverria-Fenn (Independent Scholar)
The Silk Road imaginary has historically relied on a totalizing dichotomy of East and West that
deemphasizes ancient cross-cultural connections along other axes, such as between China and East
Africa.i
Similarly, academic discussions of cross-cultural narrative and artistic reception often assume
and center the existence of a white “Western” subject, neglecting questions of cultural exchange
between two different colonized or exoticized communities. This paper will focus on the way that both
these histories are confronted in the work of contemporary queer artist Devan Shimoyama. Shimoyama
places the cultural iconography of his Black Trinidadian and Japanese-American heritages in dialogue
with each other in ways that heavily utilize textures and textiles—especially luxurious ones such as silk,
sequins, and floral embroidery. In doing so, he gestures at luxury and adornment as a tool of survival
and resistance to white supremacy, and at texture as a way to mourn and reclaim both Black and
Japanese-American history in ways that language and narrative cannot: “And none of my sculptural
work really fits into the category of narrative, either, as they’re more like symbols or spontaneous
memorials.”ii
Furthermore, many of the fabrics and patterns Shimoyama highlights are marked as queer or
associated with drag performance, and this mixture of Trinidadian and Japanese influences is mapped
onto a mixture of gender bending and non-binary figural representations that insist on a multiracial
gaze even as they utilize the iconography of Greek myth (literally: the eyes of Shimoyama’s Greek
mythological figures come from photos of his mother’s eyes). This paper will explore the way silk and
other fabrics in Shimoyama’s work can be read against both ancient Greco-Roman stereotypes of
Eastern cultures’ luxuriaiii and contemporary stereotypes of Black and queer adornment in three of
Shimoyama’s works of classical reception: The Abduction of Ganymede (2019), Daphne (2015) and
Daphne’s Prayer (2016).
Finally, this paper will consider how Shimoyama uses the sexual violence of both these myths to flip the
above stereotypes back onto the monstrous consumption and resource hoarding of white supremacy—
using abstract textural symbolism as a non-narrative representation of histories that he marks as un-
narratable and indeed unspeakable in their horror.