Yang has been described as a 'Chinese-Australian artist' and a 'Chinese-Australian gay artist'. These terms are accurate enough, but (as Grehan and Scheer argue) they fail to capture the complexity of Yang's work. This 'work describes something beyond and beneath the surface of his story'; he has produced heartfelt, complex, and often confronting art about the communities that he has belonged to. Yang was born in North Queensland in 1943, and began exhibiting his photography during the 1970s. In the following decades, Yang branched out into performance art and documentary-making. His work has provided perspectives on Sydney's gay community, and specifically on certain members of this community. Yang has also investigated what it means to identify as Chinese in Australia.

In terms of genre, this book sits somewhere between a conventional biography and a scholarly monograph. The prose is generally fresh, save for the authors' use of that weasel word du jour, 'space' (e.g. 'he leaves space for us to inscribe our own responses ...') Effective use is made of secondary sources. These include Roland Barthes's study of the relationship between death and photography. Death is a theme invoked in Yang's photos of AIDS patients during the height of that epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. As the authors put it, 'these works retain their power to wound, but ... also provide a way of healing through memorialisation and reflection'.

Throughout the text, there are some stunning reprints of the artist's photography. William Yang: Stories of love and death is an intelligent and moving read. It is also stunning to look at.