‘Now I couldn’t take a camera into a sauna’ … William Yang at the exhibition Inside the Mirage at the TarraWarra Museum of Art in Victoria. Photograph: Thomas McCammon for TarraWarra Museum of Art View image in fullscreen ‘Now I couldn’t take a camera into a sauna’ … William Yang at the exhibition Inside the Mirage at the TarraWarra Museum of Art in Victoria. Photograph: Thomas McCammon for TarraWarra Museum of Art Photography ‘The whole world is becoming rightwing and anti-gay’: William Yang on 60 years of capturing LGBTQ+ life Yang has taken more than 500,000 photographs since he first moved to Sydney in the late 1960s and now devotes most of his time to untangling the past
As a young adult, William Yang discovered that his family’s story was actually a murder mystery. His uncle, William Fang Yuen, was killed by an employee on the family’s farm in far north Queensland in 1922, but his mother refused to tell him the full story. In 1990, he travelled to Innisfail in search of the truth.
One aunt told Yang that his uncle and the worker had got into a fight over a gambling debt, and the worker had stabbed him to death with a spear. A cousin said a gang was involved. A local woman, who had been a child at the time, remembered it as a card game gone wrong.
Desperate for concrete evidence, Yang visited the local courthouse, where he was presented with a dusty box of documents. Inside, there were papers caked in his uncle’s blood.
“He was holding these when he died,” the sprightly 82-year-old recently told a rapt crowd at TarraWarra Museum of Art in Victoria, his photograph of the stained sheets of paper glowing on the screen behind him.
View image in fullscreen Blood spattered documents, from William Yang’s My Uncle’s Murder series, in 2008. Photograph: William Yang View image in fullscreen William Fang Yuen and business partners, from William Yang’s My Uncle’s Murder series, in 2008. Photograph: William Yang It turns out there was no spear, no mafia, no game of poker. Piecing together the records, it seems Yang’s uncle had accused his employee of fiddling the farm’s accounts. They had an argument and Yang’s uncle was shot dead. The man was brought to trial, then acquitted in a decision that many believe was racist: Yang’s uncle was Chinese and his employee was white. “This verdict upset the Chinese at the time,” Yang told his audience. “They thought it was a great miscarriage of justice.”
Yang’s account of his family’s story is part of TarraWarra’s exhibition Inside the Mirage, which features several artists whose work explores the diaspora experience in Australia. Seven of Yang’s trademark annotated photographs tell the story of his uncle’s death and how it traumatised his mother, who was 16 when it happened and raised Yang and his siblings to be “more Australian than the Australians.” On the final photo, of a transcript of the evidence that his mother gave during the trial, Yang has written: “I feel the legacy of this murder came down to me in that, while I was growing up, my ethnicity was suppressed.”
Yang now devotes most of his time to untangling the past. He has taken between 500,000 and 1 million photographs since the late 1960s, when he first moved to Sydney. It was there that Yang came out as gay in his late 20s and became a documentarian of the city’s LGBTQ+ community, photographing individuals and events through the debauchery of the 1970s, the horror of the HIV/Aids crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, the growing acceptance an…