Photographer William Yang presents a slide show of his life in new show Milestone

Photographer William Yang grew up in northern Queensland in the 1940s and 50s, desperately wanting to fit in. As a third-generation Chinese-Australian, William always felt like an outsider, despite his mother’s efforts to assimilate him. His mother spoke Cantonese, his father spoke Hakka, but the family communicated solely in English.

“My mother wanted us to be more Australian than the Australians,” Yang said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s (ABC) radio program, The Stage Show. “She didn’t want us to be different and be a target.” As a teenager, he realized he was gay, which deepened his sense of being an outsider. “It was like a double whammy for me,” he said.

In 1969, Yang moved to Sydney, where he became known as a photographer documenting the city’s emerging gay subculture. In the 80s, he began exploring his Chinese heritage and became known for his performance works, in which he presents his photographs as a slide show accompanied by spoken monologues. Now 81, Yang is one of Australia’s leading artists, whose work has been shown in major institutions, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, exploring themes of family, sexuality, and cultural identity. In 2021, his career was the subject of a major retrospective at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, titled “William Yang: Seeing and Being Seen.”

In his latest show, “Milestones,” a performance piece conceived to celebrate his 80th birthday, he reflects on his life through the lens of photography. The show will premiere at the Sydney Festival in January, followed by a tour to Melbourne in February as part of Asia TOPA. When Yang arrived in Sydney, the city was on the cusp of massive social change. As the gay liberation movement took hold, his circle of like-minded artist friends began gradually coming out to each other.

Yang says he never consciously decided to come out, but was “swept along by the events of the time.” The early progress of the movement was slow. “It didn’t happen overnight,” Yang said. “It took a whole decade for a gay community to form; it wasn’t until the 80s that Sydney had a gay culture.” In 1981, Yang was invited by his friend Peter Tully to document the Sydney Gay Mardi Gras, who was instrumental in transforming the now iconic annual street party from a protest march into a celebration of queer culture. “He was Mr. Mardi Gras,” Yang said of Tully, who died of AIDS-related illness in Paris in 1992. “Peter was always at the front in his spectacular costumes, which he called ‘urban tribal wear’.”

Yang became a fixture in Sydney’s gay social scene, photographing the parties and events he attended. But at the time, being photographed as a gay man was risky. For example, teachers could lose their jobs if they were identified as gay. “By the 80s, some people were out, but there was still a lot of fear about being exposed,” Yang said. But for others, appearing in Yang’s photos was an act of activism. “Some people would say… ‘Take our picture, publish it,’ because they were yearning to be seen,” he said. “The gay community had been invisible for hundreds of years, and now there was a chance to show ourselves.”

Yang’s involvement in the world of gay activism led him to explore other aspects of his identity. In the 80s, Yang became a Taoist and began considering his cultural identity for the first time. “My Chinese heritage had always been denied and unacknowledged,” he said. “I felt very uncomfortable saying I was Chinese, but I was politicized by the gay movement. I realized the importance of visibility, so I embraced my Chinese heritage. People called me a ‘born-again Chinese’ at the time, which is not a bad description, but I now see it as liberation from racial oppression, and I prefer to say I came out as Chinese.” In the 90s, he founded a group called Asian Lesbian and Gay Pride. “We discussed what it was like to be Asian in a predominantly Anglo gay community… [and] the politics of desire, where most of the people who were considered sexually attractive were white,” Yang said.

Yang’s interest in the intersection between gay and Chinese identities permeates his work, such as images like “Another Self” (2000), “which sexualized the Asian male body.” “I was always photographing attractive men,” Yang said. “This time, I specifically chose Asians as the subject.” In 1989, Yang launched his first performance work, “The Face of Buddha,” a series of nine “photo essays” combining storytelling, images, and music into one show. It was a performance format that grew out of the slide shows he held in friends’ living rooms in the 80s. “When you show slides, it’s natural to talk along with the images,” he said.

In his 1992 stage play, “Sadness” – later adapted into a feature film by director Tony Ayres – Yang interwove two parallel stories. One told the story of his great-uncle, William Fang Yuen, who was murdered in the 1920s in northern Queensland by his boss, a cane farm manager, who got away with it. The other story told of the AIDS crisis that was then devastating Sydney’s gay community. “Many of my friends were dying,” Yang recalled. The play was a hit, striking a chord with audiences, and toured internationally, with Yang finding his work in demand around the world.

Yang first collaborated with composer and pianist Elena Kats-Chernin on his 2012 slide show performance, “I Am a Camera,” which explored his family relationships across the Chinese diaspora. “She’s like a conduit to a universe of sound. I can play her a sequence of projections, and she can almost immediately create music,” Yang said. Yang and Kats-Chernin have collaborated again on “Milestones,” working with an orchestra led by conductor Simon Bruckard in Sydney and the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra. “[Elena] says herself that she’s very excited about this project, and she will be playing piano in Sydney… and in Melbourne,” Yang said. “You’ll be getting a double bill of Elena and me on one ticket – two for the price of one.”

“William Yang: Milestones” will be performed at the Roslyn Packer Theatre in Sydney on January 10 and 11, and at Hamer Hall in Melbourne on February 20, 2025.