See George Gittoes’ Portrait of William Yang at http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an12020150-1
Nugget Coombs instigated the Creative Arts Fellowships at ANU in 1965, when William Yang was metaphorically panning for gold as a young man growing up in Dimbulah, Far North Queensland.
The ANU Research School of Humanities renamed the Fellowships in honour of Dr H.C.Coombs in 1996, the year before he died. By then he would have known of the success of William Yang, photographer and storyteller, and would not be at all surprised to know that Yang is the current H.C.Coombs Creative Arts Fellow until the end of May.
Nor would he mind extending the metaphor. Yang’s nuggets have panned out with increasing purity over the decades. He began as a Queensland University architecture student but discovered photography. Moving to Sydney in 1969, gold was revealed in the form of Rex Cramphorn, who became one of the most original theatre directors in Australia. But working as a writer who watched the then experimental Performance Syndicate actors in improvisation workshops, turning out playscripts which were rarely performed, Yang found that “all that glisters is not gold” in the sense that he could not make a living this way.
He did get a brief cameo role in Syndicate’s only commercial production, The Legend of King O’Malley, and remains a friend of author Bob Ellis to this day.
By 1974, photography re-emerged from the gravel in the pan. “I started photographing parties and I thought that real life threw up better situations than I could think up as a playwright” explained Yang to ABC TV presenter Stephen Feneley, on the occasion of a retrospective of his work at the State Library of New South Wales in 1998. Yang seemed to me too quiet and contained to speak of “throwing up”, but maybe he meant tossing the pan around to remove the dross.
In a sense the period between 1974 and 1989 produced successful flashy stones as well as the less obvious genuine gold. The parties Yang photographed often featured people who were celebrities in the social pages, so for some 15 years the man behind the camera made a living from the glossy magazines. He could do this, he noted, “because I’m Chinese [and] people don’t notice me as much. I mean, it’s a funny psychology, but I have felt that I’ve been more invisible than other photographers.”
During this time, Yang became a celebrity in his own right. The Australian Centre for Photography began to bring photography “to people’s consciousness as an art form”. Yang’s photographs exhibited there in 1977, titled Sydneyphiles, startled gallery viewers because of their unadorned, even raw depictions of social situations, being seen in a new light on a gallery wall rather than being flipped past in a magazine. Many shots shocked people who had not seen such images of gay people before. Yang noted how viewers used diversionary behaviour to deal with their shock. “I think that there was a sort of prejudice against the gay images, which people couldn’t come out and say, ‘oh, we don’t like these gay images’. Instead they said ‘oh, he uses flash. What dreadful lighting’. And so I think that they attacked me in that way.”
At home, where Yang likes to work surrounded by his own archive and equipment, away from the commercial, often black-and-white work, out of the public eye he found himself stirring a different pan, of his collection of colour slides. Gold slowly appeared as he experimented with the idea of making short stories with the images. This work reconnected Yang with theatre performance when he came out from behind the camera and presented nine photo-stories in the form of monologues and slide projections in the Downstairs Theatre at Sydney’s Belvoir St Theatre in 1989.
Audiences responded so well, especially to the stories centred on Yang’s family history, that he was able at last to drop commercial photography which had exhausted him by this time. He realised that he had created a new genre, still unique world-wide, which integrates story-telling, images on up to seven projectors, and music. The evolving form has produced a series of shows including Sadness (1992), Friends of Dorothy (1998), Blood Links (1999) which are largely autobiographical, followed by stories of other communities such as Aboriginal people of Enngonia and the German immigrants of South Australia in Shadows (2002) - which he performed in Canberra in May 2006 - and his first study of the “inner journey of the spirit” in Objects for Meditation at Sydney Opera House in 2005 and at the Melbourne International Arts Festival 2006.
It may seem an easy life, taking pictures and telling stories about them, but it can easily cost $50,000 to put a show together. The Australia Council Theatre Board has been a regular contributor, with a range of other sponsors. Sometimes individual audience members, from widely scattered locations as Yang tours Australia and internationally, may help with preparing the next show. Sometimes it is a venue, knowing his audience drawing power, which provides support in kind. Often it has been an arts festival which tops up the needed funds, and this was to have been the case with the Sydney Festival in January 2007.
Unfortunately, to Yang’s great disappointment, this sponsorship fell through. His current work, China, could not be finished and his performance had to be cancelled. However he was perhaps lucky that the ANU Creative Arts Fellowships rotate. Visual artist one year, writer the next and this year a performing artist. Working away from home is not necessarily easy for Yang but he is pleased to have been awarded the Fellowship not only because of the recognition of the quality of his art but also because his stipend will enable him to complete China and to begin work on his next show which has the working title My Generation.
China is about Yang’s experiences visiting China as he has done now over many years, learning more about Taoism which was introduced to him in his thirties by a Chinese teacher who told him “ 'You're ashamed of being Chinese’. I had to admit that I was. So that brought the change in me where I had to catch up on all those years and I researched the Chinese in Australia and I’ve told that story as the basis of a lot of my modern work.”
China will be performed in-house for ANU staff and students in March. It takes the audience on to modern China and will be performed for the general public in Sydney at the new home of the Performance Space at Carriageworks, 245 Wilson Street, Eveleigh for a short season March 20-24 (performancespace.com.au).
My Generation, a study of Yang’s experiences in Sydney in the 1980s, will be staged in 2008.
Already he is finding his time at ANU is “terribly busy”. Though he is not required to teach, he is giving some lectures, he finds that there are so many interesting people to talk to and who want to ask him about his work that he has to control his social life, he has taken on two students in apprenticeship roles, and he has to learn the processes needed to produce quality digital images from his collection of slides.
He is highly appreciative of the range of people with specialist expertise at ANU and especially gives thanks for having been taught how to set up and use the appropriate computer scanning program to create his images at professional quality. He has also found a specialist player of the Chinese erhu, PhD student at the ANU School of Music, Nicholas Ng, one of the few players in Australia and who will perform with Yang in China. Yang has long collaborated closely with live musicians such as Colin Offord (Shadows), and he sees his interaction with arts people, technicians and social historians as an important aspect of his Fellowship.
Gabriella Coslovich, writing about William Yang in The Age, quotes the Chinese Taoist sage Lao-tzu: “The master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything” and I found an hour in conversation with Yang left me thinking about the nature of his art. His images are of things as they are, but the music and the storytelling make the meaning of these pictures manifest. I wondered if, to do this, he had to create a role for himself to perform. He said, “No. Like everyone I have a private and a public self” and it is his public self who tells the stories, not an acted character different from himself.
Hearing this, and observing the slight, perhaps wry smile which goes with his words, I felt that HC Coombs did the right thing back in 1965 to provide this gold nugget with a place to shine.
“In 1989 I knew I was on to a good form,” Yang says, explaining that in one sense the series of images he shows look like raw film, yet the limitations created by the slide show format force the audience to “work a lot harder at one of my pieces than if they were watching a documentary film”. The work “alludes to a novel, or an opera”. Because it is a performance, and people pay to see it, there is a special commitment, more than walking around a gallery “speed viewing”. People have to draw their own conclusions as the narrative progresses. They have to make sense of it for themselves, and “they enjoy the challenge” says Creative Arts Fellow William Yang.
© Frank McKone, Canberra
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