Energy is Eternal Delight
Hi, all! And welcome to all the new subscribers, I’m so happy to see you!
It’s been exactly a year since my second most-recent newsletter update, and I don’t know if that’s just weird timing, or the strange effect that October always has on me, or the fact that Xiao Zhan’s birthday (October 5th! Happy birthday!) always jolts me out of complacency, or what — but I’d been thinking about writing this newsletter installment today anyway, and then several things converged in my brain to give me a surprise topic.
(In the year since that update, I bought a house, moved a time zone away, got adopted by a surprise kitten, and had a slow steady miserable job meltdown that resulted in my leaving Vox after close to a decade. Thus I must restart my career. If anyone has any tips on how to do this, feel free to share. I have not properly had to look for a job since 2011, and so far I’m proving terrible at it. I have had a few nice freelance opportunities, though! The one most relevant to you lovely readers is probably this piece I wrote about Kpop Demon Hunters and the state of K-pop fandom for my dear pal Elizabeth over at Fansplaining.)
In Yibo land, not much has changed since this time last year. I confess that I’ve been happily letting the “news” part of the newsletter slide in part because my friend Jane started making (and faithfully updating) these delightful Wang Yibo Weekly video updates over on her YouTube channel, and I highly encourage everyone to go check them out! They’re way more information-packed than my attempts to actually do updates.
We still have no news on his most anticipated project, Intercross, the Hidden Blade follow-up he made with Cheng Er. There’s a rumor circulating that it will premiere at the next Cannes, which I was excited about until I remembered that the same rumor circulated about the last Cannes. Oy. We do have a confirmed… time/place for when we might get a confirmed release date for Exploring the Unknown Season 2, so that’s something!
Outside of industry activities, Yibo has been off doing high-level outdoor adventures, often combined with high-level brand promotion and production, which is a depth of marketing savvy for which I can only congratulate him. He’s clearly having the time of his life, and he looks healthier and happier these days than we’ve ever seen him.
He’s also made quite a lot of progress racing, including, as I write this, gearing up to do an 8-hour marathon race, of which he’ll race a two-hour leg. It says a lot about how accustomed I’ve gotten to his daredevil escapades and general competence on the track since my last letter that I’m not nearly as anxious about this as I was, even though he preceded this race by unwisely doing a whirlwind jaunt overseas for Paris Fashion Week. More on that in a moment.
His racing trajectory also includes apparently having recently gotten his international racing license, which qualifies him to compete at a global — and presumably much more competitive — level. I’m once again ignoring the danger element here and focusing on the positives, which is that this is clearly going to end up with him marrying Valentino Rossi, mark my words.
So… LOEWE
The thing about Yibo doing Paris Fashion Week is that he’s done it enough times it’s a routine for him. He used to be visibly nervous and tense among all these strangers (although I’m shamelessly pleased every time he and Anna Wintour show up at a show together. This must be some sort of weird local pride I didn’t know I had. That’s THE fashion diva, okay? I have read so much unhinged lesbian porn about her alter-ego Miranda Priestly that on some level I feel this must give me and Yibo a Bacon degree of two.) and now it’s clear that he’s much more relaxed and comfortable doing this whole thing.
At least, he was this time at yesterday’s Loewe show. At Chanel and Lacoste, he’s typically shepherded around and cosseted a little, and even though that’s only what he deserves, I think he was quite content this time being mostly left alone to do his own thing. And we got some adorable cute Yibo moments out of it.
At first I, like everyone else in the fandom, it seemed, was horrified by this look. Of course, as soon as I’d decided I hated it, it started to grow on me. I like the bright color combo, I like the embrace of maximalism, I like how simply comfortable he seems to be in this outfit, and also the way he was able to constantly clutch at his bright yellow sweater sleeves as a fidget apparatus.
The whole look also made a lot more sense to me in the context of the whole Loewe show. This was the debut collection for new directors Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez, who have been an out queer couple since they were in college, and thus have built their entire careers together as life partners. (Before this they helmed Proenza Schouler, a fashion house I’d never heard of before but immediately liked because of its wearable New Yorker aesthetic.) This show was clearly combining their longstanding interest in eclectic but practical urban design with a return to Loewe’s roots as an intrinsically Spanish brand, with bright fiesta colors and a fixation on geometric structures. A dash of expressionism, El Greco.
I should disclaim that I’m not a fashion person, I’m really just an art person who looks in on fashion like Ebenezer Scrooge peering sadly through the window pane into a temporality he cannot hope to enter. But that said, I’m not alone in really liking this runway show! So far I’ve only seen people waxing enthusiastic about the look. I agree with whoever called it “contemporary bullfighter attire,” and if you saw my alt-text on the previous photo, I noted that look reminded me of a matador’s cape, so clearly my instincts aren’t totally off!
I think Loewe has always prioritized looks that are essentially functional high art. Yibo’s tenure with them reflects that — that towel shirt and that woodland collection are total opposite ends of the same iconic spectrum — and it’s always seemed to me that he really respects Loewe, not just as a sponsor but as a brand. Yibo knows fashion, he knows what pops and what doesn’t, and he told interviewers that he chose yesterday’s look himself. When we consider Loewe as art and Yibo’s brand ambassadorship as him participating in creating that art, we can consider Yibo himself as being cognizant of both the brand’s function as art and his own function as, essentially, artwork.
Which brings me to William Blake.
What?
He whose face gives no light shall never become a star
I recently stumbled across an admittedly very tiny but still fascinating rabbit hole of William Blake scholars trying to contend with His Whole Deal. I’ve always considered Blake to simply be a proto-psychedelic folk artist, born before his time, born too early and too Christian, alas, to join all his wild visions with his wild experimental art and observational poetry in a way that really made sense to generations of readers. If he’d simply been plopped down in the 1960s he’d have produced a tarot deck or something and been understood. But as a product of the late 18th century, he represents a whole confounding literary phenomenon to legions of academics.
“The body and the soul, and the material and the immaterial, are not opposed for Blake in the way we ordinarily think of them,” explains Blake scholar Saree Makdisi, and like. That “we” is doing an awful lot of work there, right? Like, it obviously ignores the entirety of East Asian holistic tradition, while suggesting that there’s an inherent divide between these things in the English-language and European literary tradition. I’m not sure that there is. (Aren’t most Romantic poets kind of obsessed with un-dividing them? Oh wow, I didn’t actually intend to make two newsletters in a row about British Romantic poetry, but here we are.) But this gives you a sense of the way people fixate on Blake’s work as a kind of body/mind/soul/earth fusion. To that we might as well add the fusion of art and text; Blake scholars and enthusiasts seem to be deeply preoccupied with the way he joined text and art. I don’t really get this? It’s like they’ve never seen a comic strip or a Tumblr gifset before? Maybe these specific nerds haven’t, idk.
Anyway, this all leads the scholar Matthew Green to create a framework he calls “visionary materialism” around Blake — what he calls “a combination of spiritual perception and an emphasis on embodiment.” He cites an earlier scholar, Northrop Frye, who labeled Blake a visionary — specifically the kind of guy who “creates or dwells in a higher spiritual world in which the objects of perception in this one have become transfigured and charged with a new intensity of symbolism.”
Maaaaaybe you start to see where I’m going with this. In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake writes:
Man has no Body distinct from his Soul. For that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
Energy is Eternal Delight.
This prose-poem-artwork is full of bangers; the section labeled “Proverbs of Hell” is gleefully full of an erotically charged humanism that seems to baffle people still today. But it all makes so much sense. Dip him in the river who loves water! The soul of sweet delight can never be defiled! He whose face gives no light shall never become a star!
I’m not exactly trying to say that this past year of living dangerously has been Wang Yibo’s way of ascending to a higher visionary state in which he simultaneously experiences the world as few have lived it while also synthesizing it with his ascended artistic purpose. I am, perhaps, suggesting that his mountain-climbing, his car racing, and his fashion and film choices are all part of the same spectrum. That is, a charged erotic energy meeting a zen sense of self, resulting in a Yibo who sees and experiences more deeply, more carefully, more confidently.
In other words, he is trying to get — or more likely has already gotten — to the place Green describes when he writes of Blake: “in which seeing the physical world entails a vision of the spiritual, in which the sensual is not denied, nor restricted to the pursuit of philosophical pleasure, but improved to such an extent that corporeal and intellectual pleasures occur simultaneously.”
This is, after all, basically just another way of describing the entirety of Exploring the Unknown. It’s not just, after all, Yibo saying to us over and over “do what you love.” If that was his only message, he’d be far less compelling. We can get that from anyone. What fascinates us about Yibo is the way he does what he loves — with clear concentration but also effortless joy. The training, the straining, and the accomplishment somehow all become the same thing when he does it. SDC3 will forever remain an epic hero’s journey not just because we watched Yibo and his team overcome so many obstacles to win the season, but because we saw in every moment how committed Yibo was to dance as an entire joyous communal experience. We saw how much that joyous communal experience is what he seeks from every encounter, whether it’s with humans or with nature. Energy is Eternal Delight.
I may be suggesting all of this is a precursor to the next phase of his entertainment career, whatever that may be, but at this point I simply have no idea what that looks like. He can clearly do anything. I’m overcome with decision fatigue just thinking about it. What I can say with certainty is that whatever comes next, it will draw on all of this time he’s spent away, and everything he’s learned, and hopefully will give us more to see.