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William Yang, Australia b.1943 / Self portrait #1 1992, printed 2013 / Inkjet print on paper / 87 x 119cm (comp.) / Purchased 2013. Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art Foundation Grant / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © William Yang
William YangSelf portrait #1 1992–2013
Not Currently on Display
Self portrait #1 is a landscape work (in the way Yang talks about landscape which is often rooted in people and place and memory) as much as it a portrait work. When Yang returns to the Queensland landscape from his childhood, he characterises it as a site to escape from. He needed to escape from racist school bullying, constrictive family expectations, and the dread that his sexuality may be met with disapproval.
Yang revisits his childhood home regularly, and some of his most potent performances and photographs come from connecting family and place. The series ‘My Uncle’s Murder’ — and its recounting of an injustice borne of racism dating from 1922 — resulted from such a trip. In his later works, he makes an uneasy peace with these past experiences that are embedded in the landscape of his youth.
The text with this image reads:
I stood in the place where my uncle, William Fang Yuen had been shot 70 years ago, and I tried to put all the stories together. The[y] were all different. But there was one thing that they all agreed upon and it was this. The Chinese at the time felt very unhappy about the outcome of the trial. They felt there had been a great miscarriage of justice.
William Yang is a third-generation Chinese Australian whose grandparents migrated to Australia during the 1880s gold rush. He grew up at Dimbulah on the Atherton Tableland in Far North Queensland and describes his upbringing as one in which his Chinese ethnicity was suppressed and denied.
Yang studied architecture at The University of Queensland, and in 1969 he moved to Sydney to become a playwright. He took up social photography as a way of making money and soon gained entry into the city’s theatrical and artistic circles. His photography during the 1980s and early 1990s documents the social and artistic life of Sydney.
In 1983, Yang met Yentsoon Tsai, a Chinese teacher from Taiwan. Their friendship led Yang on a quest to discover his Chinese culture and heritage. He changed his name from the anglicised ‘Young’ to ‘Yang’, and he began researching his family history.