Slides show memories of strangers with familiar faces

By GILBERT WONG arts editor

It is audacious. People pay to watch a man project slides of his relatives while in a wry monotone he retells stories about them.

It sounds like the kind of evening most of us beg off with feeble excuses to avoid terminal boredom. That the man doing it is a quiet, slight, gay Chinese-Australian makes it seem all the more unlikely.

William Yang has never trained as a performer. There is no script, only the memories he holds in his head. Yang, by inclination, is no extrovert with a desire for attention.

The people whose faces he reveals are strangers.

But to those who have attended previous works by William Yang, a new performance piece is a treat to be savoured, a thoughtful meditation on family, diversity and difference.

Yang, talking from his home in Bondi, titters, fully aware of the sheer cheek of it all. For most of his adult life, he had been a photographer, an intimate of Sydney's gay and literary scenes.

Then 12 years ago his life changed. Instead of recording other people's lives, he began to look at the multicultural; multi-generational; multi-ethnic maze of tales linked by the now 57-year-old photographer.

Without the pressure of commissioned work, Yang found he could make a living selling his own photographs and working on slide performance pieces.

His first, Friends of Dorothy, was an insider's perspective on gay Sydney. But it is the trilogy that he completes with new show Blood Links that has earned Yang a unique spot in performing arts.

The first of the three, Sadness, showed a cavalcade of Yang's friends, dead and dying, many from Aids-related illnesses. North, his next production, looked more closely at Yang's family origins, how he grew up in the north Queensland town of Dimbulah and the search for his Chinese heritage.

Blood Links, which he brings to Auckland, concentrates on the phenomenon of diaspora. His once insular family from Southern China has spread through Australia and North America. It is a common story for immigrants and part of the story of our times but for Yang, it always starts with the personal.

"This is about after my mother died. I found I didn't really know my relatives, my mother [Emma Yang] had the relationship with them. She would tell me about them and that was how I knew of them. It was a very secondhand relationship."

His performance work enabled him to travel and as he did, looking up long-lost relatives, many he had never met. In particular, the mantle of family matriarch fell on the shoulders of Yang's older sister, Francis Fukuda, who he had not seen for 25 years.

"I had to get to know her. She's in Los Angeles, married to a Japanese American doctor. She's quite conservative. We had to cross swords a bit and she can be quite a controlling person."

Yang's quest and the realignment of family dynamics meant for the first time that he was "out" or acknowledged as openly gay by his extended family.

"Sexuality is an issue. I had come out, but had to come out to my family. My mother wouldn't let me be gay in front of the family. It wasn't acknowledged so all that had to come out as well."

His relatives now cover five generations and there has been much inter-marriage.

"In Australia, especially, my relatives have married into the mainstream and they don't have much Chinese identity."

Identity. That's the core to his performance work and photography. Yang sheds no tears for the slow, inevitable demise of Chinese cultural identity in the face of assimilation, though his conversation carries a certain wistfulness.

He brightens when he recalls his nephew Nicholas.

"He's half-Chinese, half Australian. He was 15 when he saw Sadness on videotape. It touched a chord, I think because he was struggling with his identity.

"It's good when you focus issues for someone. If you're fitting in with Australian society then you can forget about your Chinese heritage.

"I see Nicholas occasionally and he's planning a trip to China. It has been a nice connection to make with a member of the family."

Yang finds the concept too diffuse and individual to allow for bald generalities or platitudes. Nor does he make any particular claims to his own Chinese heritage.

"I found I couldn't be Chinese. You can't be anything else other than what you are. You can't become another culture. You are conditioned so strongly, it's deep and unconscious.

"It is there and it's how I look. I can claim the culture and that's something because it's a wonderful culture. I can claim the culture, but I can't live it."

It's the kind of conundrum his performance pieces play with. The world is gray, despite the crispness of the black and white images Yang chooses to collect.

"I want people to realise that the world is diverse and in most people's daily lives where they are set in their culture, they don't think about how diverse life is. If people could open up to cultural diversity it would solve so many of our problems."

Blood Links will be the final project on his family for some time. Yang has run out of stories, though through an habitual quest for potential material he does plan to look up a New Zealand relative. He is planning another project based on ideas about Aborigines. It might take another seven years to reach fruition, by which time the diminutive Yang will be well into his 60s.

He laughs. "I'll keep going, sometimes I lecture students and tell them that I hope I die in the dark room."

Without his photography, Yang fears he would have given into hedonism. "There's nothing wrong with that," he says, "But it's more satisfying to produce a print in the dark room."

* Blood Links by William Yang, Herald Theatre, February 14 to 24.