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William YANG, My family in North Queensland, gelatin photograph, 2001, Cairns Art Gallery Collection
William YANG, My family in North Queensland, gelatin photograph, 2001, Cairns Art Gallery Collection
William YANG, My family in North Queensland, gelatin photograph, 2001, Cairns Art Gallery Collection
William Yang is best known as a photographer of people. My Family in North Queensland displays places William visited around Innisfail, Cairns and Dimbulah, where his family’s history is set, all the time taking photographs.
Born a third–generation Chinese Australian, Yang grew up in Dimbulah on the Atherton Tableland and describes his upbringing as one in which his Chinese ethnicity ‘was suppressed and unacknowledged’. He met a Chinese teacher who encouraged him to embrace his Chinese heritage. As a result of this revelation, he went on a trip, in 1990, to Far North Queensland to talk to his relatives about the murder of his uncle, William Fang Yuen. In 1922 Fang Yuen had been shot by the white manager on one of his cane farms.
IMAGE: William YANG
My family in North Queensland 2001
60 gelatin photographs, 14 text panels
Commissioned by Cairns Regional Gallery, 2001
