William Yang

William Yang moved from Brisbane to Sydney in 1969 and worked as a freelance photographer documenting Sydney’s social life which included the glamorous, celebrity set and the hedonistic, sub-cultural, gay community.

In 1989 he integrated his skills as a writer and a visual artist, he began to perform monologues with slide projection in the theatre. They tell personal stories and explore issues of identity. He has done twelve full length performances, many of which toured the world.

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.