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https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ng-interactive/2026/aug/25/sydney-photographer-william-yang-on-60-years-capturing-lgbtq-life-ntwnfb>
"As a young adult, William Yang discovered that his family’s story was actually
a murder mystery. His uncle, William Fang Yuen, was killed by an employee on
the family’s farm in far north Queensland in 1922, but his mother refused to
tell him the full story. In 1990, he travelled to Innisfail in search of the
truth.
One aunt told Yang that his uncle and the worker had got into a fight over a
gambling debt, and the worker had stabbed him to death with a spear. A cousin
said a gang was involved. A local woman, who had been a child at the time,
remembered it as a card game gone wrong.
Desperate for concrete evidence, Yang visited the local courthouse, where he
was presented with a dusty box of documents. Inside, there were papers caked in
his uncle’s blood.
“He was holding these when he died,” the sprightly 82-year-old recently told a
rapt crowd at TarraWarra Museum of Art in Victoria, his photograph of the
stained sheets of paper glowing on the screen behind him.
It turns out there was no spear, no mafia, no game of poker. Piecing together
the records, it seems Yang’s uncle had accused his employee of fiddling the
farm’s accounts. They had an argument and Yang’s uncle was shot dead. The man
was brought to trial, then acquitted in a decision that many believe was
racist: Yang’s uncle was Chinese and his employee was white. “This verdict
upset the Chinese at the time,” Yang told his audience. “They thought it was a
great miscarriage of justice.”
Yang’s account of his family’s story is part of TarraWarra’s exhibition Inside
the Mirage, which features several artists whose work explores the diaspora
experience in Australia. Seven of Yang’s trademark annotated photographs tell
the story of his uncle’s death and how it traumatised his mother, who was 16
when it happened and raised Yang and his siblings to be “more Australian than
the Australians.” On the final photo, of a transcript of the evidence that his
mother gave during the trial, Yang has written: “I feel the legacy of this
murder came down to me in that, while I was growing up, my ethnicity was
suppressed.”
Yang now devotes most of his time to untangling the past. He has taken between
500,000 and 1 million photographs since the late 1960s, when he first moved to
Sydney. It was there that Yang came out as gay in his late 20s and became a
documentarian of the city’s LGBTQ+ community, photographing individuals and
events through the debauchery of the 1970s, the horror of the HIV/Aids crisis
in the 1980s and 1990s, the growing acceptance and subsequent journey to gay
marriage in 2017.
Alongside these are photos documenting how Yang came to embrace his Chinese
heritage – he says he “came out as Chinese” in his mid 30s – as well as his
portraits of Australian cultural luminaries such as the writers Patrick White
and Barbara Blackman; artists such as Brett Whiteley and Max Dupain; and actors
like Cate Blanchett and Sam Neill."
TarraWarra Museum of Art is near our house in Healesville.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
