From playwriting, William Yang turned to photographing parties and social events to make money. His 1977 exhibition Sydneyphiles and 1984 book Sydney Diary recorded the 1970s/80s emergent gay community and Sydney party scene.
In the 1980s William began to explore his Chinese heritage, and his photographic themes expanded to include landscapes and the Chinese in Australia. He began performing monologues with slide projections in theatres in 1989, integrating his skills as a writer and a visual artist. These slide shows were recognised as a unique form of performance theatre and are his preferred way of showing his work.
Yang has toured Australia and the world with shows such as Sadness, Friends of Dorothy, The North, Blood Links and Shadows. More recently in 2018 he performed PARTY (verb) at Liveworks Festival, a show about the queer party scene in Sydney in the 80s, and in 2019 at Unwrapped Festival at Sydney Opera House. In 2023 he created Gay Sydney: A Memoir for Sydney WorldPride. In 2021 he was honoured with a retrospective exhibition at QAGOMA, Brisbane. As part of the exhibition, the gallery commissioned a performance piece titled In Search of Home.
A featured artist in the Biennale of Sydney: A Thousand Suns (March–June 2024), William has held significant solo and group exhibitions at the National Gallery of Australia; National Library of Australia; Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art; National Gallery of Victoria; Museum of Contemporary Art Australia; Higashikawa Arts Centre (Japan); San Diego Museum of Art (USA) and Art Gallery of NSW.
His work is held in numerous major public and private collections including the National Gallery of Australia; National Library of Australia; National Portrait Gallery; Art Gallery of New South Wales; Queensland Art Gallery; National Gallery of Victoria; Higashikawa-cho Municipal Gallery, Hokkaido, Japan and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.
