Why Yuja Wang can’t have it both ways

In my new monthly essay in The Critic, I examine the fatal fallacy in the Yuja Wang image – look at me, but don’t look at me – and how an artist’s self-exposure can wreck a potentially important career. Here’s how it begins:

Onto a stage bounds a young woman in a backless gown slit up to the hip, or a micro-dress cut an inch below the butt. That’s right, I’ve turned into a fashion critic. And the moment these words appear I shall come under a social-media onslaught for committing the unforgivable male offence of reporting what a female artist wears, instead of how she plays.

My defence is that Yuja Wang does everything possible to draw attention to her appearance. She habitually changes costume in a concert interval to show more leg and she feeds the internet with a stream of selfies in halter tops and skimpy shorts.

Tap “Yuja Wang” into your phone and you’ll get the full flaunty. Yet, under present rules of permitted speech, it is not supposed to affect our judgement of who she is and what she does. Well, let’s breach that taboo and see what happens….

Read on here.

By way of further self-exposure, Yuja had her latest promo photo taken by Geoffroy Schied a professional Munich photographer. Her caption reads: ‘When beach vibes and rehearsal vibes are the same thing.’

That’s the thing, Yuja – they’re not. You can’t have it both ways.

Can you?