ASIA SOCIETY PRESENTS
BLOOD LINKS
By William Yang
Soundscape by Stephen Rae

Wednesday and Saturday, November 20 & 23, 2002, 8:00 p.m.

At Asia Society and Museum
725 Park Avenue (at 70th Street)
New York City

The Asia Society invites audiences to join world-renowned Chinese Australian performance artist William Yang as he presents his latest work, Blood Links, an unusual and poignant theatrical production.

Blood Links is an unconventional performance piece, a blend of photography, music and conversation. The piece tracks the migration of Yang's ancestors from China to Australia over the last one hundred years. Created with over 500 hauntingly beautiful slide images of landscapes and family portraits accompanied by a tender and humorous monologue by Yang and an original soundscape by Stephen Rae, the piece explores the history of his family's journey and the ties which bind this scattered diaspora together, as well as the more complex issues which arise from belonging to two cultures that are distinctly different yet inextricably linked. As an Australian of Chinese ancestry who also happens to be gay, Yang is a double outsider. Using this beautiful tapestry of photographs and intimate reminiscences, Yang shows us through his own family our connectedness to one another.

William Yang is one of Australia's most respected performance artists. Born William Young in North Queensland, he is a third generation Chinese Australian. Yang obtained a degree in architecture from the University of Queensland following which he moved to Sydney in 1969 and joined an experimental theater group. He also worked as a playwright and a freelance photographer. In the early 1980s Yang set out to explore his Chinese heritage and this is reflected in his photographs, which began featuring landscapes and Chinese subjects. This was the beginning of his personal journey into his past as well as his search for the links between his past and present.

Yang began performing his monologues with slide projection in the theater in 1989, integrating his skills as a writer and a visual artist. Since then, these slide shows have been recognized as a form of performance theater and his acclaimed shows, Sadness, Friends of Dorothy and The North, have been performed around the world. One of the most toured Australian performance artists, Yang has presented Blood Links in Canada, New Zealand, Belgium, Denmark, the Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, USA and the Festival d'Automne in Paris, France. He was awarded International Photographer of the Year at the Higashigawa-cho International Photographic Festival, Japan in 1993 and was given an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Queensland in 1998 for his services to photography.

Stephen Rae has composed for film, theater, television and the commercial medium. He won the AFI Award for Best Original Music Score in 1994 for the soundtrack to Pauline Chan's film, Traps. The soundtrack was also awarded Best Original Music Score by the Film Critics Circle and by the Australian Guild of Screen Composers. In 1995, Rae won the Australian Guild of Screen Composers Best Soundtrack Album Award for the CD recording of the soundtrack to the feature film Mary.

Tickets to the performances are $20 for nonmembers and $16 for members, seniors and students. For information, please call (212) 517-ASIA or visit www.AsiaSociety.org.

In conjunction with Blood Links, the Asia Society will present a screen adaptation of Yang's performance, Sadness (Tony Ayres/1999/52min), which also explores his Chinese Australian background and relays his experience of loss during the AIDS epidemic, on Thursday, November 21 at 7:00 p.m. Tickets are $10 for nonmembers and $7 for members.

Major support for performance programs at the Asia Society is provided by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation. Additional support for the Asia Society's cultural programs is provided by the Friends of Asian Arts, Wallace - Reader's Digest Funds, The Starr Foundation, the Booth Ferris Foundation, the Hazen Polsky Foundation Inc., and the Harold J. and Ruth Newman Philanthropic Fund.

The Asia Society is America's leading institution dedicated to fostering understanding of Asia and communication between Americans and the peoples of Asia and the Pacific. A nonprofit, nonpartisan educational institution, the Asia Society presents a wide range of programs including major art exhibitions, performances, media programs, international conferences and lectures, and initiatives to improve elementary and secondary education about Asia. The Asia Society is headquartered in New York City, with regional centers in Washington, D.C., Houston, Los Angeles, Hong Kong and Melbourne, Australia, and representative offices in San Francisco, Manila and Shanghai. For more information, contact the Asia Society, 725 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10021. (212) 288-6400. (www.asiasociety.org).

# # #