MICHAEL REID BEYOND
William Yang
ARTIST PROFILE
To celebrate the announcement of our Berlin gallery’s representation of William Yang, we visited the Queensland-born photographer, performance artist and cultural trailblazer at his Eora/Sydney home, where he lives and works alongside his vast photographic archive spanning five decades.
For more than 50 years, Yang has been one of the most important and prolific chroniclers of Australian cultural life, capturing the celebrated and the marginalised, the public and the radically personal with inimitable clarity, empathy and unwavering candour.
From his essential works of social documentary – lensed at the front lines of parties, protests and performances through which LGBTQIA+ identity, autonomy and community came to be expressed and defined – to his intimate, diaristic portraits of family, friends and lovers, many of which were set against the ravages of the AIDS era, Yang has built a vast and extraordinary body of work that today stands among the most significant social archives of the past half-century.
“William Yang is widely regarded as one of Australia’s most significant photographic storytellers, blending autobiography, social history and performance in a body of work that has helped redefine the nation’s visual narrative,” says Michael Reid OAM. “His work endures not only for its aesthetic and documentary power, but also for its gentle, unwavering commitment to truth-telling – across generations and cultures.”
Following the artist’s recent solo exhibition at Michael Reid Berlin, which brought together 14 key works from across his career, Yang’s permanent, ongoing representation in Europe offers further recognition of his work’s enduring resonance and global significance, while affirming our commitment to celebrating his practice on the international stage. Alongside this announcement, we are delighted to present a curated selection of iconic and indelible photographs once again drawn from across distinct stages of his career. Many are now in their final editions and are exclusively available to explore and acquire on the Michael Reid Berlin website or by request.
Propelled by his medium’s capacity for storytelling, Yang often inscribes and reanimates his photographs with handwritten recollections of encounters with his subjects, charting the ebb and flow of their relationships over time and offering intimate reflections on how each picture came to be. The sum of these stories is at once an urgent record of a vanishing queer and artistic underground and an ever-evolving statement of the artist’s subjectivity – expressed with an unvarnished immediacy that belies the quiet beauty and fleeting moments of grace amidst the grit and glitter.
“A photograph captures a specific moment in time. You don’t have to do anything special to do this, it just happens, it’s part of the nature of photography,” Yang writes in the introduction to his 1997 book Friends of Dorothy. “Because it is the nature of the world to change and move onward, these moments can never be repeated. To take a photograph of an event as opposed to writing a document means that you have to be there.” Yang has always been there – bearing witness to some of the most urgent cultural, political and personal histories of the past half-century.
In recognition of his contribution to Australian visual culture and LGBTQIA+ visibility, Yang was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 2021 – the same year the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) staged his landmark retrospective Seeing and Being Seen, which traced his career from his exuberant early days documenting Sydney’s queer scene to his acclaimed bodies of work reflecting on cultural identity and family history.
“[My mother] thought being Chinese was a complete liability and wanted us to be more Australian than the Australians,” says Yang in an interview with QAGOMA. “So, the Chinese part of me was completely denied and unacknowledged until I was in my mid-30s and I became Taoist. It was through my engagement with Chinese philosophy that I embraced my Chinese heritage. People at the time called me Born Again Chinese, and that’s not a bad description, but now I see it as a liberation from racial suppression – I prefer to say I came out as a Chinese.”
“I would like my art to convey feelings, emotions, what it is like to be a sentient human: experiencing joy, laughter and sadness, to realise we are vulnerable, that we have our failings, we do bad things, but we are capable of forgiveness, kindness and love.”
WILLIAM YANG
“By combining photographs with words in his award-winning slide projection monologues, he expands on the context of his images and avoids the risk of cliché,” notes Michael Reid OAM. “Sadness (1992) recounts the grief his family felt after the 1922 murder of his uncle, paralleled with the loss experienced by the gay community during the AIDS crisis. These monologues have been presented at major festivals and venues in Australia, Europe, and North America, blending image, memory, and live narration to create a deeply affecting form of documentary theatre.”
Yang began 2025 with Milestone at the Sydney Festival – a performance marking his 80th birthday that drew on his vast archive of photographs and interwove them with personal reminiscence. Radiating his trademark warmth, humour and candour, Milestone was hailed by The Sydney Morning Herald as “a body of work that speaks a universal language, inviting us to forget about those differences that are only skin deep and reflect on the things that are truly important.” A creative triumph and deeply moving, Milestone set the tone for a year of milestones – from his solo exhibition at Michael Reid Berlin to the announcement of his ongoing European representation, establishing 2025 as a defining chapter in his brilliant career.
“Prior to our representation of William in Berlin, it had always been a not-so-secret thrill of mine to be photographed by William, while running about Sydney,” says Michael Reid OAM. “As this country’s foremost documentarian, the entire archive of William’s practice is heading to the State Library of New South Wales. Should William capture your photograph, you will live on for hundreds of years within a prestigious museum. William can make people almost live forever.”
