William Yang mines his family history for his art in Blood Links at the Canberra Theatre

Where will this one show up, they want to know. Which show will feature this particular family dispute, and what will you say about this family saga?

And they have a point. Yang has spent his entire long career – 39 years and counting – mining his own life and family history for his art. From intimate photographs of the gay, lesbian and transgender world, to his famous monologue presentations, complete with slide shows, Yang has long woven in stories about his Chinese heritage, Australian upbringing, complicated migration experience, life as a gay man and everything in between.

"In the '80s, I started doing slide projection – that's projecting images with music – and there's also a natural tendency when you do slide projection to talk with the images," he says.

"I started talking with the images, and I did my very first ... monologue with slide projection in 1989 at the Belvoir Street Theatre in Sydney, and it was immediately successful. Ever since then I've just done my main works as performance with image projection."

He's now done 11 full-length works and has toured the world with them to great acclaim. And, throughout it all, the one defining thread has been Yang himself.

"When I started doing these pieces, I started off doing them about subjects ... the Bicentenary, in 1988, and things like that," he says.

"But after I'd been doing them for a while, I realised that the thing that held these pieces together, all these diverse subjects, was me, I was the glue that held it together. So they've become more, really, about me.

I think that's what people really want to hear, because I'm there telling my story, as quite a strong presence. Not that I'm a strong presence, but the actual story, straight from the horse's mouth, is a strong presence."

His latest work, Blood Links, playing at the Canberra Theatre this month, is no exception. Inspired by the photograph-strewn walls of his sister's home, he is moved to consider the blood links that link his family – scattered, disparate, far from its origins but united by something beyond mere geography.

And while his own family's story is distinctive and particular, he says one of the main responses to his show has been that audiences have found themselves being drawn into the narrative, and quickly recognise their own families in his work.

"What you'll see is me talking. I've got two large screens behind me, and there's a soundtrack, and so it's really just those three elements, and they're presented very simply," he says.

"After a while you get drawn into the story. That's what people tell me."

He says his work, while utterly distinctive and often described as avant-garde, is really on par with what everyone, including him, is doing now anyway – sharing photos on Facebook.

"This is a performative version of that. It's still bloggish by nature, but it's more of a public performance, and it's kind of blown up with the music," he says.

"I often think that the music is slightly operatic in this form, because it's very stylised, and there's quite a lot of emotion in it, and people tell me that they're moved by the piece. People read their own family into the story, because everyone's got a family. And one of the central stories in it is an argument between three cousins, which they never resolved during their lifetime. Many people come up to me and say, 'Yes, I had an uncle like that, and he had a fallout from whoever and they never spoke about it for the rest of their lives'."

His family – accepting, by now, of their place in his artistic trajectory – recently demanded to know whether there was likely to be a Blood Links II in the works.

"I said no, but there are actually deeper currents behind some of the stories," he says.

"I have been thinking of telling some of those stories at some stage, but maybe I have to wait for some people to die before I could tell that."

William Yang's Blood Links is playing in the Courtyard Studio at the Canberra Theatre Centre until April 23. Visit canberratheatrecentre.com.au or call 6275 2700 for bookings and information.