Word: yangness
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...Australian of chinese descent, William Yang is intimately acquainted with the world of the outsider. Over the past 30 years, the award-winning photographer and performance artist has been quietly telling an alternate story of Australia, one inhabited by the displaced and marginalized - from AIDS victims to Aboriginal Outback tribes to the little-known Chinese settler communities dotting remote rural areas...
...Yang, whose work has featured at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, has also told a more joyful, hedonistic tale of the country, capturing its gay and party scenes, and its key cultural figures, from the late Nobel Prize - winning author Patrick White to actress Cate Blanchett. From Sept. 19-25, he will showcase 16 prints of Sydney gay life at the Pingyao International Photography Festival in northern China's Shanxi province, while next February a major new work, My Generation, commissioned by Australia's National Portrait Gallery and based...
...Yang is excited about his Pingyao debut, if a little uncertain about how some of the raunchier images - of naked bodies and nude men embracing - will be received by the country's conservative art establishment. The photos, he says, are "all kind of vaguely erotic, without being in-your-face. What I wanted to do was open up a discussion about homosexuality, which is something that's not talked about much [in China]." (Read "Why Asia's Gays are Starting to Win Acceptance...
...Born William Young in northern Queensland in 1943, Yang grew up in Dimbulah, a tiny tobacco-farming town, with no connection to his Chinese heritage. His grandparents emigrated from China in the 1880s, and his family was completely assimilated - he and his siblings spoke only English. At 6, after a white schoolmate called him "Ching Chong Chinaman," Yang went home upset and asked his mother if he was Chinese. She gravely told him yes. "I knew in that instant," Yang writes on his website, "that being Chinese was a terrible curse...
...Staff writer Helen X. Yang can be reached at hxyang@fas.harvard.edu...