William’s current work is photo-based, with gallery exhibitions embracing both documentary photography and photo media. Text written on the prints is often a feature of his work. He has converted three of his theatre performances into film at the University of NSW, which have been broadcast on ABC1.

In 2021, William had a major retrospective of his work, Seeing and Being Seen, at QAGOMA in Brisbane. It comprised 250 printed works, videos, and four of his films were shown in a cinema. A commissioned piece, In Search of Home, was performed during the season.

‘I was brought up as an assimilated Chinese Australian, partly because of the way my mother brought me up. She had wanted my siblings and I to be more Australian than the Australians, but it was cultural as well. Migrants, or new Australians as they were called, were expected to assimilate and to speak English.

I knew I was gay from a very early age, and I came out as a gay man in the early seventies, during that exciting time of change, the Gay liberation movement. It politicised me, as I had to take on all the baggage of public opinion, which had a very negative view of homosexuality. Strangely, I never quite realised I was Chinese until my mid-thirties. I identified as being Australian and was in a state of denial about my Chinese heritage. In the eighties, I learned Taoism, a Chinese philosophy, and this led me to embrace my Chinese heritage, which had hitherto been unacknowledged. Now I see this as a liberation from racial suppression and I prefer to say I came out as Chinese.

The last step in claiming my heritage was a trip to China in 1989. I was able to embrace China and the Chinese I met welcomed me back, but the complexities of being bicultural became apparent. I’ve been back to China many times. Now I call myself mainly Australian and claim my Chinese heritage as part of my identity. This exhibition is about my journey to make that claim.’