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Exhibition is available from 20 February to 5 May.
Register now to attend the opening of the William Yang Exhibition: Claiming Heritage on 9 March here. The opening is free to attend with registration. Viewing starts at 2pm, opening starts at 4:30pm.
The Institute for Australian and Chinese Arts and Culture at Western Sydney University is honoured and privileged to present William Yang’s solo exhibition Claiming Heritage. The Vice Chancellor of Western Sydney University Professor Barney Glover AO will open the exhibition and William Yang will give his famed monologue performance. The guest speaker is Tessa Leong, Artistic Director of Contemporary Asian Australian Performance.
William Yang is one of Australia’s most celebrated photographers and internationally renowned performance artists. His five decades of extraordinary works make him an iconic chronicler of our time. His art is both intensely personal and universally relatable. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Queensland, William moved from Brisbane to Sydney in 1969 and worked as a freelance photographer documenting Sydney’s social life, offering a unique view into the glamourous, celebrity set, subcultures, marginalised groups and gay community. From early on, he adopted the tradition of photographic documentary known as photojournalism. His first solo exhibition in 1977, Sydneyphiles, caused a sensation because of its frank depiction of the Sydney gay scene. He has since held over twenty individual exhibitions across Asia, Australia, Europe and North America, the latest being the major retrospective show, Seeing and Being Seen (2021) at QAGOMA in Brisbane.
William was born as William Young on the Atherton Tableland in north Queensland to Australian-Chinese parents. His grandparents migrated from Guangdong, China to Northern Australia in the 1880s. William was brought up as an assimilated Australian with little knowledge of his Chinese heritage, because under the White Australia policy, his mother believed that, in William’s words, “being Chinese was a complete liability” and wanted William and his siblings “to be more Australian than the Australians”. It was not until his mid-thirties and through his engagement of Chinese philosophy, Taoism, that William began to explore and embrace his Chinese heritage. In 1983, William changed his name to William Yang. He made his first trip to China in 1989 and has since been back to China many times.
In 1989 William Yang integrated his skills as a writer and a visual artist and he began to perform monologues with slide projections in the theatre. His performances tell personal stories and explore issues that touch all human beings such as identity, grief, death, family, friendship, home, and so on. He has done twelve full-length performances, many of which have toured the world. These slide shows were recognised as a unique form of performance theatre and have since become his favourite way of presenting his work and a signature part of his practice. His famed monologue performances include Sadness, Friends of Dorothy, The North, Blood Links, China and Shadows. He has converted three of his theatre performances into film and these have been broadcast on ABC1. The film Sadness, directed by Tony Ayres, has received a string of awards. It was broadcast on SBS and screened internationally.
William Yang has received many awards throughout his artistic career. In 1989, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Queensland. He has been recognised as Rainbow Champion by Sydney WorldPride, one of the 45 Rainbow Champions, representing 45 years since the first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras on 24 June 1978. He has also recently received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Sydney Theatre Company.
William Yang’s work is held in the collections of many institutions including the National Gallery of Australia; National Library of Australia; National Portrait Gallery; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Museum of Contemporary Arts, Sydney; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art; State Library of New South Wales; National Gallery of Victoria; State Library of Victoria; Art Gallery of Western Australia; Art Gallery of South Australia; University of Queensland Art Museum; Cairns Regional Art Gallery, Queensland; Higashikawa-cho Municipal Gallery, Hokkaido, Japan; and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan.
