Australian photographer William Yang has made a significant and singular contribution to Australian photography over a period of five decades. ‘Seeing and Being Seen’ reveals the breadth of the artist’s thematic explorations — from his fascination with people from all walks of life, and his revelatory insights into the LGBTIQ+ community, to his exploration of his Chinese–Australian identity, and the beauty and grandeur of the Australian landscape.

Drawing on his own lived experience, Yang presents an unvarnished and uncompromising view of life in his documentary imagery. Now working in Sydney, Yang’s photography is informed by the pressures of growing up in north Queensland as a gay man from a third-generation Chinese immigrant family. Best known for his reflective and joyous depictions of Australia’s queer scene in the late 1970s and 1980s, his work reveals vulnerable and, at times, unsettling narratives from his own life and the lives of his subjects.

Storytelling is intrinsic to the artist’s practice, and in the 1980s, Yang began performing monologues, accompanied by slide projections, which he then toured internationally. Realising that many of his photographs had narratives beyond the still image, he started to scribe these directly onto his photographic prints capturing the stories of marginalised voices and communities.

William Yang’s art illuminates universal emotions and experiences — joy and sadness, death and remembrance, love and vulnerability, longing and celebration.

Feature image: Works from William Yang’s ‘About my mother’ series 2003, installed for ‘Seeing and Being Seen’, QAG, April 2021 / © William Yang / Photograph: J Ruckli, QAGOMA