New Year, New Hair! 'SNL' 's Bowen Yang Debuts Bleached Look

Bowen Yang is kicking off the new year with a new look!

The Saturday Night Live star, 31, showed off his freshly bleached locks on Instagram Sunday, sharing a silly selfie in which his eyes are half open.

"Normative queer semiotics would suggest that i am _________ but they would be wrong," Yang wrote in the caption, going on to credit N.Y.C.-based hairstylist Yu Nakata for his new 'do.

The actor and comedian also re-posted another image featuring his bleached hair, originally shared by fellow actor James Scully, to his own Instagram Story. In the photo, Yang is making a funny face while holding a drink in one hand, as the two dine at Bonnie's restaurant in Brooklyn.

You star Scully, 29, decorated the photo with a heart-face emoji.

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Yang joined the cast of SNL in 2019 after starting out as a writer the previous year and recently made his Sexiest Man Alive debut, telling PEOPLE in November that the long-running NBC sketch series "changed my life in every way imaginable."

Earlier in 2021, he also opened up to PEOPLE on his sexuality — notably, about being sent to gay conversion therapy by his parents as a teen.

"There was a huge chasm of misunderstanding," Yang said in a June issue of PEOPLE. "Neither side really understood where the other was coming from, and it led to very dangerous situations overall."

Still, "what was always constant was the intention of love from both sides. It pushed me into questioning what it meant, what was protected and what I should be protective about in terms of being a queer person," added Yang. "I don't take it for granted."

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Yang, who also co-hosts the Las Culturistas podcast, is the first Chinese American star of SNL and the first openly gay man to be featured beyond a single season.

In May, he and Joel Kim Booster chatted during an episode of Booster's Joy F*ck Club series, where they discussed how their queerness and race have "intersected and affected both [their] identities."

"It might be fair to say that at first consideration, it feels like they're identities that are somewhat at odds with each other. In terms of Western gay identities, which in a lot of ways sort of devalues Asian people or sort of puts Asian people in this weird purgatorial status in the gay community," Yang said. "That feels like it's at odds with my Asian identity, which in a lot of weird, bizarre ways is also messaged something around like, 'You don't be gay, don't be gay.' So having those two things be weird, diametrically opposed poles in some ways, having those two things have to be tightly wound together is really, really, really tough."

But also, Yang noted, "holding those two identities of being gay and Asian have, I guess, made my skin a little thicker."