Queensland-born, Sydney-based artist William Yang describes a moment in Sydney when a number of creative groups came together to generate an artistic wave that swept across Australian society.
My Generation The intersections of the tight literary circle of Nobel award winner Patrick White (illustrated) and his partner, Manoly Lascaris, with the theatrical circle, their friends Jim Sharman and actress Kate Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick, in turn, models frocks in the exuberant fashion parades organised by designers Linda Jackson and Jenny Kee, while artists Peter Tully and David McDiarmid extend the tongue-in-cheek Australiana of the two fashionistas’ outfits with witty accessories. Their parades and parties at retail outlet Flamingo Park, a magnet for influential people in business, politics and the arts, determined the look of the 1970s and early 1980s. Tully and McDiarmid used their bravura visuals to jump start the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, giving the event its unique and unforgettable style. The pair lived out a parallel lifestyle that might epitomise the Australian story of gay liberation, with its heady rush unfolding into aching tragedy.
Patrick White #1, living room, Martin Road 1988
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William Yang, Australia b.1943 / Patrick White #1, living room, Martin Road 1988 / Gelatin silver photograph on paper / 45.6 x 36.4cm (comp.) / Purchased 1998. QAG Foundation Grant / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © William Yang / View full image
Golden couple Brett (illustrated) and Wendy Whiteley enjoyed the creative atmosphere of the swinging ’60s and the plunge into a riotous world of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. Yang shows Brett painting, smoking and partying with the beautiful people, and his eventual deterioration as heroin took a fearful hold. The early death of their beautiful daughter, Arkie, was another aspect of this fated family history. Linda Jackson and Jenny Kee eventually split; Kee takes Danton Hughes, the son of Robert Hughes, as a lover; Danton suicides; Kee takes up Buddhism. Yang portrays lives that unfold, flower or wither: lives lived.
Brett Whiteley 1975
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William Yang, Australia b.1943 / Brett Whiteley (detail) 1975, printed 2021 / Inkjet print on Ilford smooth cotton rag art paper / 74 x 155cm / Purchased 2023 with funds from an anonymous donor through the QAGOMA Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © William Yang / View full image
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William Yang, Australia b.1943 / Brett Whiteley 1975, printed 2021 / Inkjet print on Ilford smooth cotton rag art paper / 74 x 155cm / Purchased 2023 with funds from an anonymous donor through the QAGOMA Foundation / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © William Yang / View full image
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William Yang performing in front of an image from 1976 of Cressida Campbell, Jenny Kee and Stephen MacLean as part of his My Generation performance at the national Portrait Gallery, Canberra, December 2008 / Courtesy: William Yang / View full image
Yang’s generation is not life as reported in the newspapers but ‘as I saw it’: a personal account summed up as a litany of parties, of innocence lost and worldliness gained, a continuum of his search for contact and meaning. Like his contemporaries Rennie Ellis or Michael Rosen, William Yang is a social photographer, a recorder of life. His strength lies in creating a living testament, and his medium’s strength is that it is necessarily shared. He offers no moral tale, nor any notion of karma to underscore the events: just the three basic but vital stories — birth, love and death.
Life Lines A major commission by William Yang was a feature in ‘The China Project’. ‘William Yang: Life Lines’ was installed at the Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) 14 March to 28 June 2009.
Yang produced two new projects: Life lines , a large collage of portraits of family members, interspersed with pictures of historical Chinese sites in Australia, reflecting the diversity of the local Chinese community, and a series of self-portraits that trace Yang’s life from early childhood to the present.
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‘William Yang: Life Lines’ installed in ‘The China Project’, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) 28 March – 28 June 2009 / View full image
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‘William Yang: Life Lines’ installed in ‘The China Project’, Gallery of Modern Art (GOMA) 28 March – 28 June 2009 / View full image
Lifelines 2009
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William Yang, Australia b.1943 / Lifelines 2009 / Inkjet print / 86 x 184cm / Courtesy: William Yang / View full image
Alter ego 2001
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William Yang, Australia b.1943 / Alter ego 2001 / Digital inkjet print on rag paper / 68 x 88cm / Courtesy: William Yang / View full image
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‘Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography’ explores how artists have used the medium to interpret the Australian suburbs, the exhibition brings together works that pause to reflect on everyday settings, places, and people, imbuing them with aesthetic, historical, and emotional significance.
While rationales for capturing ‘suburbia’ vary, the artworks in ‘Suburban Sublime’ consistently demonstrate the enduring role of photography in enriching the national understanding of familiar scenes and images from everyday life.
Bill Henson Untitled #73 1985-86
Often recognised for embodying the concept of ‘suburban sublime’ in his practice, Bill Henson is one of the most celebrated photographers working today. In the mid-1980s series ‘Untitled 1985/86’ (illustrated), he treats the service stations, restaurants and people of suburbia with a sensitivity that is normally reserved for places of worship, or historically significant architecture. Many of the photographs appear to be taken at dusk, with Henson drawing on his command of colour and light to create monumental images that are influenced by Baroque sensibilities. Reflecting on the series, Henson has said:
I realised that it wasn’t the landscapes I was interested in but the dreamscapes: the way people carry their past and their childhood around inside of them . . . Suddenly I could look at it as an imaginary landscape rather than a realistic one.
Despite the familiarity of his content, Henson’s calculated framing allows the emotion and subjectivity of a scene to supersede any sense of location and context. Often favouring such ambiguities, he imbues his images with a universal and timeless quality.
Robert Rooney Holden Park 1, March 1970 & Holden Park 2, May 1970 1970
In contrast to Henson’s drama, Robert Rooney depicts the suburbs in a mechanical, serialised manner. He documented Melbourne’s suburbs in 1970 with his first major photographic artwork War Savings Streets, which contained a poster displaying a grid of 60 photographs mapping the streets involved in donations programs during World War Two. His approach was influenced by North American artist Ed Ruscha, who Rooney has described as treating his camera like a ‘technical recorder’. While shooting War Savings Streets, Rooney noticed the continual presence of the vehicle he was using, a Holden FJ belonging to his friend, musician Barry McKimm, in the photographs. He subsequently created Holden Park 1, March 1970 & Holden Park 2, May 1970 1970 (illustrated), showing McKimm’s car parked in various streets, with the locations chosen through a pre-determined system of placing a transparent sheet with dots over a street directory. Photography as a medium lends itself to repetition; Rooney’s ritualised process foregrounded its importance to the development of conceptual art.
Photography thrived in Australia in the 1970s, with the decade seeing increased institutional support for the medium and artists using it to document the socio-politics of the era. Melbourne photographer Carol Jerrems worked among the anti-establishment counterculture of the day, with her practice geared towards feminism and optimistic social change. Her most famous photograph, Vale Street 1975, is a portrait of then aspiring actor Catriona Brown and two of Jerrems’s former students, teenagers Mark Lean and Jon Bourke. Standing in a St Kilda backyard, Brown assuredly occupies the foreground, flanked by Lean and Bourke, who eerily hover behind her. In 1999, Brown explained how Jerrems framed the image: ‘[Jerrems] chose the boys being angry, cunning and watching carefully, guarding themselves against my openness, directness and honesty . . . She was a great observer of people’.Enduringly compelling, Vale Street has become a defining image of the 1970s.
Tracey Moffatt Picturesque Cherbourg no.1 2013
Tracey Moffatt’s 2013 ‘Picturesque Cherbourg’ series (illustrated) uses landscape imagery to address highly personal human experiences. On first glance, nothing seems out of the ordinary in these bright snapshots of suburban Queensland streets. However, a closer viewing reveals deep tear lines through the photographs — which, even after being pasted back together, remain fractured, even ruptured. The town of Cherbourg was established as a mission in 1901 and later became a government settlement, where many Indigenous peoples were sent to live after being forcibly removed from Country. Describing the trauma of her family members who lived at the Cherbourg settlement, Moffatt has said, ‘The old people don’t want to talk about it, like war veterans’. Moffatt’s use of ‘sun-saturated colour’ conveys Cherbourg’s ‘complex fabric of pain and getting-on-with-it resilience’. Contextualising these picture-perfect images with violent tears, Moffatt reminds us of the psychological burden of historical realities that are often hidden behind seemingly pleasant exteriors.
Across two rotations, the photographs in ‘Suburban Sublime’ demonstrate the artistic potential of familiar places and moments that might otherwise be overlooked in the rhythms of daily life. Despite the varied origins and subjects, the works encourage us to look more closely at the everyday and the places we inhabit.
Glen O’Malley Good Friday 1987, Kelvin Grove, Brisbane… 1987
William Yang Me and Alan, living room. Graceville. 1986 2003
Grace Jeremy is Assistant Curator, Australian Art, QAGOMA
Suburban Sublime: Australian Photography
10 August 2024 – 17 August 2025
Henry and Amanda Bartlett Galleries (Gallery 6)
Queensland Art Gallery (QAG)
Free entry
Known for his reflective and joyous depictions of Australia’s LGBTIQ+ scene in the late 1970s and 80s through to the present, Queensland-born, Sydney-based artist William Yang’s work is the subject of a major survey exhibition ‘Seeing and Being Seen’. This exhibition traces Yang’s career from documentary photography through to explorations of cultural and sexual identities and his depictions of landscape —integrating his photographic practice with writing, video and performance.
Australian beach culture
Golden Summer 1987/2016
Tamarama Lifesavers 1981
William Yang embraced the bleached allure of Sydney’s eastern beaches and took many iconic photographs of Bondi, Tamarama and Clovelly. These works combine his love of people with the landscape, and many of Yang’s beach images present a refreshingly different framing of the typical Australian beach scene, in which female bodies or recreational pursuits are often the focus. Instead, Yang’s beach works take immense joy in the male body, and represent a desirous male gaze on desirable male bodies.
The power of being seen
William Yang’s work, intimate and considered, draws on the artist’s own lived experience. Yang’s personal stories inform his spoken-word performances and photography, and he often scribes these stories directly onto his photographic prints. Drawn to people, Yang’s work reveals unsettling narratives in his own life, in the lives of his subjects, and in society. Adept at uncovering the unvarnished beauty and hidden foibles of our lives, storytelling is intrinsic to his practice. The artist spoke with exhibition curator Rosie Hays.
Rosie Hays Are there stories you feel must be told? What draws you to the stories you tell from your own life?
William Yang I [was] brought up as an assimilated Australian. Neither my brother, Alan, or my sister, Frances, or I learned to speak Chinese. Partly because my father’s clan was the Hakka, so he spoke Hakka, whereas my mother’s clan was the See Yap, and she spoke Cantonese, so English was their common language and that was what we spoke at home. My mother could have taught us Cantonese as it was generally left up to her to do that sort of thing, but she never did. She thought being Chinese was a complete liability and wanted us to be more Australian than the Australians. 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 as there was a certain zealousness to the process, but now I see it as a liberation from racial suppression, and I prefer to say I came out as a Chinese.
Chinese New Year Party Year of the Rabbit 1999
My first big success was my show ‘Sydneyphiles’ at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1977. It was mainly about my social life in Sydney, with portraits of people I had met. Besides my own set of artistic types (I knew Brett Whiteley, Martin Sharp, Jenny Kee and Linda Jackson), I brushed with celebrities on the social rounds working for magazines. The exhibition caused a sensation. I knew then that people were my subject. I found that they wanted to see themselves on the gallery walls, they wanted representation. A compromising photo might cause annoyance, but it was better than being left out. There has always been an appetite for celebrities, well, that was to be expected. A vicarious interest in celebrity life still fuels the media. But I showed many photos of the emerging gay community as well. Australian photos of this type had not been shown in institutions before and it got a mixed reaction. Some said that these works shouldn’t be shown at a public institution, but mostly the pictures were accepted, especially by the gay community. A few were angry with me for outing them, but mostly I was hailed as a hero and was metaphorically given the keys to Oxford Street. I sensed that the mood of the gay community at the time was this: throughout history our community has been invisible. These photos may not be pretty, but we recognise them, and we accept them. We want our stories told.
Four film directors 1981
Brett Whiteley, Martin Sharp, Wirian 1982
Jacki Weaver, Derryn Hinch. Richard Wherrett Farewell Party, Sydney Theatre Company 1990
Ben Law. Arncliffe 2016/2020
These days I don’t take as many photographs. I’m sorting through my collection, trying to get it into some sort of order, and trying to digitise the negatives and the colour transparencies [. . .]. I don’t want to be a photographer who dies leaving a pile of mouldy negatives for someone else to sort out [. . .]. Every time I look through my collection, I am surprised because I have largely forgotten what happened in the past. Photography is a major aid to memory and the photographer a witness to the past. A photograph captures a moment in time. You don’t have to do anything special for this to happen, just press the shutter. There is something in the nature of the camera to freeze these moments in time, and there is something in the nature of the world to change and move on, so these moments never occur again.
In the early 1980s I started to do slide projection. It started off as a way to show my colour photography. At the time the colour printing process, Cibachrome, was expensive, and projection was a cheaper way showing my colour images. In 1980 in Adelaide, I met Ian de Gruchy, who did slide projection as his main art form. I was interested in his dissolve unit — a device using two projectors where the projected images dissolved into each other. Music was used, usually minimal music, and the result was known as an audio-visual. When one projects slides, as in a...
