Becoming Myself: A keynote lecture by William Yang

One of Australia’s most significant artist-storytellers, William Yang has spent five decades mapping identity, community and belonging across cultures. His monologues fuse photography, performance and memoir into a single form, chronicling Sydney’s gay scene from its hedonistic emergence in the 1970s through the devastation of the AIDS era, while also tracing his Chinese-Australian heritage and his connections to the Australian landscape and Country.

At TarraWarra Museum of Art, Yang presents a rare keynote lecture and performance slideshow as part of Inside the Mirage. He will speak on his experiences living between multiple worlds: community, culture, memory and place, and the practice that has made him one of the most important documentary artists of his generation.

William Yang

William Yang is an Australian photographer and performance artist who lives and works in Sydney, New South Wales. Renowned for his exploration of cultural and sexual identity, Yang’s multidisciplinary practice spans photography, writing, performance, and film. Yang began his career as a playwright before turning to photography after relocating to Sydney in 1969, where he worked as a freelance photographer documenting the city’s vibrant social life from its glamorous celebrity circles to its hedonistic, subcultural gay community. His seminal exhibition Sydneyphiles (1977) and book Sydney Diary (1984) chronicled the emergence of Sydney’s gay scene during the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1980s, Yang deepened his engagement with his Chinese heritage, expanding his photographic practice to include landscape and explorations of the Chinese-Australian experience. From 1989, he began integrating his photographic work with writing and performance, creating distinctive monologues accompanied by slide projections. These deeply personal works examine identity, memory, and belonging, and have toured internationally.