William Yang – Writer, Performer & Photographer
William Yang, third generation Chinese-Australian, was born William Young, in Mareeba, North Queensland, in 1943. Yang studied architecture at the University of Queensland but in 1969 moved to Sydney, where he became involved with an experimental theatre group.

Yang worked in Sydney as a playwright from 1969-1974, and since then has worked as a freelance photographer. His first solo exhibition in 1977, Sydneyphiles, was a frank depiction of the Sydney scene which included the glamorous, celebrity set and the darker, underground, gay scene. His photographic themes soon expanded to include landscapes, and Chinese in Australia. During this period he made frequent visits to China.

In 1989, Yang began performing his monologues with slide projection in the theatre. These slide shows were recognised as a form of performance theatre and have since become his favoured way of showing his work. This unique theatrical style has taken Yang around Australia and the world with acclaimed shows such as Sadness, Friends of Dorothy, The North, Blood Links, Shadows, Objects for Meditation and China. Sadness wove together two themes: the discovery of his Chinese heritage, and the rituals surrounding dying and death in Sydney. In 1999 it was adapted for the screen, directed by Tony Ayres, and shown at film festivals around the world, winning numerous awards.

Yang is one of the most toured Australian performance artists. In addition to his famed monologues. Yang has presented over 20 individual exhibitions across Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. A retrospective at the State Library of NSW in 1998 based on his Sydney Diary highlighted Yang as a social historian of the times. In 1993, Yang was awarded International Photographer of the Year at the Higashigawa-cho International Photographic Festival in Japan. He received an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Queensland in 1998 for his services to photography, and was awarded the H.C. Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship in 2007 by the Australian National University.