Maddycairns

Biography

William Yang was born in 1943 in North Queensland, and is a third-generation Sydney based artist.

William Yang Maddycairns
Born	1943, aged 72 Born in North Queensland
Nationality (legal)	Chinese
Education	Bachelor of Architecture at Queensland University
Known for	Freelance Photography

He is recognized for his documentary style photography, which explores ideas and notions of sexual identity and culture since the 1970’s, where he also explores and links components such as writing, performance and film in his works. Many of the works Yang creates are based around his Chinese family, gay identity and even topics surrounding AIDS. After Yang completed a Bachelor of Architecture at Queensland University he moved to Sydney in 1969 and pursued a career as a freelance photographer documenting life in Sydney. As Yang’s career continued it evolved into his art telling stories and talking people through journeys that explore his intriguing life being Australian-Chinese, but also the struggles he dealt with growing up, affirming with his true identity, and also his families struggles throughout their lives living in Australia as Australian-Chinese citizens.

General

Yang's career has lasted over three-decades, and over that period of time his distinctive and unusual work has not been fully recognized by society, as well as very little being written on his work. Yang's approach to his photographs is what sets him apart from the rest of his peers, as he places a deep personal element to his works as well as a casual aesthetic he adds various other components to his work such as film, playwriting, theatre, music and many more, which creates the separation between him and other photographers. Yang's works all involve similar ideas and concepts that portray similar ideas surrounding sexual identity and family, which is seen consistently in his works, soon after he began to be less interested in documenting the social scene he decided to head into a different direction and became more focused on 'personal imagery', photography his friends/family, everyday objects and even landscapes. Since then Yang has continued down this path and further evolved his ideas through his photography.

Education

In the earlier years of Yang's life he studied architecture at the University of Queensland in Brisbane and then later graduated. Although his interests did not lie with architecture he was much more interested in theatre, therefore he moved to Sydney to pursue his interest and do a stage set where he met and later joined at theoretical group run by Rex Cramphorn where he soon found out that he could make a living from photography. This is also when he bagan to photograph parties and event which he believed to be somewhat theoretical and thats what he liked about them, which them lead him to work for the social pages of magazines, which then also lead to Yang becoming a freelance photographer.

Exhibitions

Yang has featured and been in many exhibitions and galleries since the 1970’s. Some of the significant galleries Yang has featured in include:

• Life Lines (part of The China Project)
• Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2009, Claiming China.
• Australian Centre for Photography (ACCA), Sydney, 2008, Diaries.
• State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998, Sydney Photographed.
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1994, From Bondi to Ularu.
• Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 1977, A Chinese Legacy.
• The University of Queensland, Brisbane, 2007, World Without End.
• San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, 1998, Art in the Age of AIDS.
• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1994.
• Claiming China, Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, 2008.
• A Chinese Legacy, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, 2007.
• Sydney Photographed, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 1994.

Yang's work has also been gathered and shown by a number of institutions which therefore makes Yang an even more significant artist, some of these institutions include:

• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
• State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.
• National Portrait Gallery, Canberra.
• National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
• Higashigawa-Cho Municipal Gallery, Hokkaido.
• Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Japan.
• Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.
• Queensland Art Gallery/GoMA, Brisbane.
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney

In 1977 Yang held his first exhibition at the Australia Centre for Photography, in Sydney which was called the "Sydneyphiles". This exhibition which was his first solo exhibition, sparked a large number of reviews which commented on his honest portrayal of the gay and party scene in Sydney, which Yang is able to relate to as he came out openly as a gay man in 1969 after the emergence of the Gay Liberation Movement. Then later on in 1984 the same photographs that were exhibited in the "Sydneyphiles" were then exhibited in a much larger exhibition, "The Sydney Diary" which was held at Hogarth Galleries in Sydney, which was also published as a book.

On the 28th October 2010, the Chinalink Gallery in Redfern, Sydney had a grand opening which had a whole space called Comings and Goings dedicated specifically to Australian-Chinese contemporary artists, which also unveiled the different relationships between the Chinese and Australian practitioners. The gallery space featured a total of twenty-six well-known Australian Chinese artists, some of those people include Lindy Lee and William Yang who deeply explores the relationships between the two cultures as well as other themes such as sexual identity which also ties in with family and friends.

Projects

Blood Links In the project "Blood Links" Yang explores the complex web of his family and its history. Before Yang claimed his Chinese heritage, he had already learnt of how his grandparents migrated from China in the 1880's to dig for gold in Australia, although he strongly continued to deny it up until his mid-life. Yangs long and hard discoveries of his genealogy allowed him to uncover other relatives from a number of generations, some of those being poor, rich, or just regular people with average jobs, with many of them unable to speak one word of Chinese. The project "Blood Links" observes how through the Chinese migration they are able to inaugurate their heritage in foreign lands, which is also carried throughout future generations which is done through intermarriage, where the blood is mixed, yet the complex bond between the families still remain and continue to stand. This is shown through Yang and his families tight bond with each other.

""Life Lines"" The project Life Lines by Yang along with two other projects; Three Decades: "The Contemporary Chinese Collection" and Zhang Xiaogang: "Shadows in the Soul" were all a part of the exhibition 'The China Project' created and fully run by the Queensland Art Gallery's, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA), where each of the contemporary Chinese artworks which are part of major projects focus of key issues surrounding family and the troubles of being Chinese- Australian.

Monologues

Sadness is a monologue with slides created by Yang and was first presented in Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney in 1992. All of Yang's theatre pieces begins with photos and from there the monologues grow and the words come not long after the photos. In 'Act One - Friends' of the monologue 'Sadness' Yang describes the heartache of his much beloved friend Allen who he hadn't seen in a long time and was in St Vincent's Hospital battling AIDS. As Yang clearly and accurately describes the condition of Allen throughout Act One, the photos that follow along with the words contribute to telling the story and the terrible way that Allen deteriorated in a short time and then later on died in 1990. Yang also openly talks about and shares photographs of his family that are closest to him and those who aren't so close, and their struggles being Australian-Chinese as well as the troubles they encountered with sexual identity and HIV which are key issues discussed and described by photographs in the monologue. In this monologue Yang shares numerous realistic and true stories about his family and friends which involve personal issues and struggles which is what makes this monologue confronting for those who read it. The photographs that Yang has taken for the monologue are used to company the words in order to make the stories become more realistic. Throughout the whole monologue Sadness Yang describes the raw details of his life and the issues that were thrown at not only him but his family and friends. Yang was assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its art funding and the advisory body, which assisted him in achieving the monologue.

Quotes

• "I was born in North Queensland and grew up denying I was Chinese, with a sense of shame quite close to the surface. " - William Yang
• "I think my photography is extremely simple. I’m not looking for complex things." - William Yang
• "In fact the simpler I get it, the stronger it is for me, but at the same time it takes more confidence to present something that’s simple." - William Yang
• "Presently, in a general sense, I feel that documentary photography, in which my own photography is based, is undervalued." - William Yang
• "The first photograph that registered on me, I think I was about eight, was a long panoramic photo of junks in Hong Kong harbour… it registered as a foreign place completely different from anything in Australia, yet it was part of my history." - William Yang
• "A photograph captures a specific moment in time. You don't have to do anything special to do this, it just happens, it's apart of the nature of photography." - William Yang