The Complexity of Belonging

I first encountered William Yang’s work in 2002 when I attended Sadness, a performance of what he called his ‘slide show with words’, at the Perth International Arts Festival. To say I was unprepared for the power of the work is an understatement. In Sadness, Yang took spectators on a journey through a range of stories from his life. He documented aspects of growing up in far north Queensland, discovering his Chineseness, negotiating his sexuality, documenting the literary, cultural and arts scene in Sydney since the 1970s, and living through the AIDS epidemic and its impact on his friends and on the broader society of the time. In his performance works, these stories and images are shared through Yang’s quiet performance style while his large photographs are projected on screens behind him. Watching him discuss often confronting images of loss and death, without any apparent overt emotion was a perplexing experience, especially when the images were personal and arresting. Similarly, funny and sometimes scandalous stories are also shared without any emotional overcoding within the work. It is this ability to remain still and, to keep his composure and to let the story and images speak together, when combined with the nature of the stories told – of loss, of love, of suffering of family and of friendship -that makes his work so profound. Yang’s oeuvre comprises his slide show performances, still photographic images and filmed documentaries of his slide shows.

In Self Portrait #2, he recounts the experience of discovering his Chineseness and not knowing what it meant. He was taunted in school by other children, and he knew that whatever they were saying about his identity, it wasn’t a good thing. As Yang recounts in his hand-written annotation on the self-portrait:

When I was about six years old, one of the kids at school called me “Ching Chong Chinaman, born in jar, christened in a teapot, Ha. Ha. Ha.”  I had no idea what he was talking about, but I knew from his expression that he was being horrible to me, so I went home to my mother, and I said to her, “Mum, I’m not Chinese, am I?”  My said to me very sternly, “Yes, you are.”  Her tone was hard, and it shocked me. I knew in this moment being Chinese was like a terrible curse and I could not rely on my mother for help.  Or my brother who was four years older than me, very much more experienced in the world. He chimed in, “And you’d better get used to it.”

His parents wanted him to grow up and assimilate into Australian society and culture.  He was not taught Mandarin, his father’s language or Cantonese, his mother’s.  It took Yang many years to begin to understand his cultural heritage and he credits Yensoon Tasi as helping him understand and reclaim his Chinese identity, as an adult. This act of reclamation helped Yang develop a greater sense of belonging.

Yang is a national treasure. He has been lauded for his contributions to Australian culture and society through his documentation of his own struggles to understand and relate to racism in Australia as he was growing up in the 1950s, as well as his documentation of the arts scene in Sydney over many years. And of course, his profound and significant portraits of friends who died from AIDS. He feels more comfortable behind the camera than in front if it and we have benefited from this. His work is exhibited nationally and internationally, and his slide show performances have been captured as films for posterity. The power of Yang’s work, both in terms of his photography and performance, lies in the honest, quiet and frank style with which he, through his images, gifts us as spectators with important cultural stories that show how far we have come as a nation and ultimately how far we still must go in relation to inclusivity, representation and social justice.