Generally, my style of photography is I’m just photographing what’s around me in my everyday life.
Probably the 80s was my most productive time when all those photographs came out because I was brushing shoulders with celebrities. But after that period, I started to do performance pieces. My photography changed a bit because one of the things that I undertook was to photograph my own family which represented the Chinese in Australia. I claimed my heritage in the 80s because the Chinese part of me was always denied and unacknowledged.
And the very first self-portrait was me standing in the cane fields in the place where my uncle had been shot. I somehow knew that this was an important event because the past and the present had somehow come together in this event. And that was a very important moment in my life. I kept doing self-portraits and I’ve done about 40 of them.
Gradually I evolved to tell my own story and just photograph things about my own life. I’m very happy that has happened because my life and my art have kind of joined together. And so I feel that I’m living my art as well as my life. And so that’s very satisfying for me.
I had to come to terms with being Chinese, being gay and just feeling comfortable as a human being. There are lots of people who aren’t comfortable about that, still. And so I try to be an example of being yourself and being visible. That’s been my philosophy.
