The pre-eminent Australian photographer William Yang was born in Mareeba, near Cairns. With great-grandparents who migrated from the south of China in the 1880s to dig for gold, Yang’s art grapples with being a third-generation Australian Chinese and what it means to be bicultural in this country.

In the 1960s Yang left the north to study architecture in Brisbane. He began writing for the Architecture Review at the University of Queensland, which led to script writing for theatre, and a serious interest in photography was to follow.

In this exhibition, drawn from the Gallery’s Collection, Yang’s photographs begin with his birthplace in the far north and trace the struggles of earlier generations of his family. His photographs capture the life and times of the Australian Chinese experience, exploring the human experience of marginalisation and belonging in order to understand the personal question, “How do I fit in?”

Uncovering his family history was to become a transformative project, as William Yang himself described:

I was born in North Queensland and grew up denying I was Chinese, with a sense of shame quite close to the surface. Partly because my mother thought being Chinese was a complete liability, a useless thing, and she wanted me to assimilate into Australian culture. It was not until I was forty that I found myself. I met a teacher who taught me Taoism and as consequence, I embraced my Chinese heritage. I have since travelled to many places in Australia where the Chinese have been and recorded their presence.

This unfolding genealogy project became transatlantic, leading Yang to scores of relatives in the United Sates and more branches scattered across the globe. 

Eventually combining his skills as a writer and visual artist, in the late 1980s Yang began performing monologues over slideshows of his images. He also began leading workshops in storytelling, particularly with minority communities, to help others share their histories and cultures, and to find their voice.