William Yang was born in North Queensland, Australia. He moved to Sydney in 1969 and worked as a freelance photographer documenting Sydney’s social life which included the glamorous, celebrity set and the hedonistic, sub-cultural, gay community. In 1977 he had an extremely successful exhibition, Sydneyphiles, at the Australian Centre for Photography which launched him as a gallery photographer.
In 1989 he integrated his skills as a writer and a visual artist. He began to perform monologues with slide projection in the theatre. These told personal stories and explored issues of identity. He has done eleven full-length works and most of them have toured the world.
William’s current work is photo based, he has gallery exhibitions, which embrace both documentary photography to works of photo media. Text written on the prints is often a feature of his work. He continues to perform spoken works with image projection in the theatre. He has converted three of his theatre performances, My Generation, Friends of Dorothy and Blood Links into films.
In 2021 William had a major retrospective of his work, Seeing and Being Seen, at QAGOMA in Brisbane. It comprised 250 printed works, videos, and four of his films were shown in a cinema.