The China Project

284 practitioners. In 2003, Yang curated a selection of works from the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, collection as part of the ‘MCA Unpacked’ project. In 2007, Yang was awarded a HC Coombs Creative Arts Fellowship by the Australian National University, Canberra, where he completed the research for his monologue China . This work traces a journey from Beijing and Shanghai to his ancestral village in Guangdong Province and the holy mountain of Huang Shan. Yang provides a deep reflection upon family connections and cultural difference in this work, and on how much China had changed over the two decades of Yang’s travelling there. For Chinese New Year in 2008, he presented a number of photographs from these travels in ‘Claiming China’ at ACP, Sydney, which later toured to the Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, with the addition of portraits of Australian–Chinese. Yang’s most recent trip to China, in 2008, was as one of ten international photographers invited by the Beijing Foreign Cultural Exchange Centre to photograph the city for an exhibition to be held during the Beijing Olympics. The exhibition did not eventuate, but Yang notes that ‘this was the first commission I had in China, and it is always great to photograph there — Beijing has changed so much’. 8 For the opening of the new National Portrait Gallery building in Canberra in December 2008, Yang was commissioned to produce My Generation , a monologue that returns to his social photography of the 1970s and 1980s. Although it is a mode that the artist had left behind 20 years earlier, he is now able to approach it from a different perspective. As he says, ‘Time helps me. That’s the most interesting aspect of my work — without trying, the camera captures moments in time, while the world keeps changing’. 9 In 2009 William Yang continues to live and work in Sydney. endnotes 1 William Yang, conversation with the author, 17 December 2008. 2 William Yang, in William Yang: Diaries: A Retrospective Exhibition [exhibition catalogue], State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 1998, p.2. 3 Yang, p.2. 4 Yang, p.16. 5 Yang, p.16. 6 Yang, conversation with the author. 7 Yang, conversation with the author. 8 Yang, conversation with the author. 9 Yang, conversation with the author. opposite Climbing Huang Shan, 2005 (from ‘GoMA self-portrait’ series) 2008 Digital print, ed. 2/20 / 40 x 40cm / Collection: The artist above Aaron Seeto Australia b.1978 The One Thousand Other Things (Blood Links) 2008 7 unique gold-toned, silver-salt photographs on salt-preserved duck eggs / Dimensions variable/ Collection: William Yang