Shadows of the past

Although he's something of a national treasure in his native Australia, multidisciplinary artist William Yang is little known here in the U.S. That may change with his current tour of his performance Shadows, which shines a light on the history of prejudice and persecution suffered by German and Aboriginal communities. The details are specific to Australia, but the themes of identity and displacement are universal; themes the photographer and actor has explored in nine shows that combine photojournalism and personal narrative. Bay Windows spoke with the man who's elevated "the genre of living room slide shows" to an art form by phone from Chicago, and found him as thoughtful and dryly humorous in real life as he is on stage.

Q: How did your shows in Chicago go?
A: We couldn't get big numbers, so that was slightly disappointing. In a big city I can fall through the cracks. I'm a hard show to market, in short.

Q: Because your show straddles different genres?
A: Right, and also no one really knows me here. This isn't my first time in the U.S. but it's the first time we've strung together a tour.

Q: I wonder if some people aren't sure they can relate to a show that sounds very specific to Australia.
A: The issues are very relevant here in the U.S.A. It deals with racism, and sometimes it's easier to address a situation in Australia because it's more complicated in your own backyard. The situation of the Australian aborigines and the Native Americans is very similar. My piece also deals with Germans who were interned in Australia during WW II, like the Japanese were interned in the U.S.A.

Q: I'm not aware of many people doing this kind of performance. How did you develop it?
A: It's a form that not many people do, so I sort of captured the market there! I started with slide projection in the 80s, putting dissolving images together with music. And when you project slides there is a tendency to talk about them. That's the genre of the living room slide show, which in some ways is the genesis of my work. It's a genre with a terrible reputation because people show too many slides. They don't know how to edit. But this form is more engaging than walking into a gallery.

Q: And how do you create one of your performances? Do you start with the photography?
A: There's a weird symbiosis going on. In some ways the piece is about the image, because there is a pictorial narrative. But I'm not really talking about the slides, I'm telling stories and contextualizing the slides. I can layer the story and fit it into a social context. The main context of this piece is colonialism in Australia. I also use music and that adds emotion to the piece. So this is sort of a trio between voice, music and image. It's quite simple actually, which I think is the strength of the show.

Q: I understand your earlier pieces were more autobiographical. How did they expand into other people's stories?
A: They evolve around my own personal stories. I'm an Australian born Chinese, so I was brought up as an assimilated Australian, and the Chinese side was unacknowledged. I'm also gay. I came out in the early 70s during the modern gay movement. I was politicized by the gay movement, and ten years later I came out as Chinese! So my first three shows were about my Australian-Chinese family, but I've run out of stories to tell. I have to wait a while for more to develop.

Q: I can see how that would lead into exploring other dispossessed groups.
A: It's all about culturally suppressed identities. Australians are sort of unsure of who they are. It takes time to develop a national identity, especially when you have a small population spread over a large area. This piece, Shadows, was commissioned by the Adelaide and Sydney Festival on the theme of reconciliation. If you say that in Australia, it immediately suggests an Aboriginal context. I had access to an Aboriginal community in New South Wales, so I used my stock of photos of this community as the base of my story.

Q: And what role do you take? Are you acting out other people's stories?
A: It's a first person narrative. I'm like the reporter. So there are two main stories in Shadows, about the German experience and the Aboriginal experience, but it's also diaristic. It's partly a travelogue of my visits to Berlin and this community.

William Yang performs Shadows at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, March 22 at The Institute of Contemporary Art, 100 Northern Ave., Boston. Tickets $28. Info: 617.875.4275 or www.crasharts.org.