He was born in Wuhan, Hubei, Republic of China. As the Yang family emigrated from mainland China, they lived first in Hong Kong for 3 years, and then moved to Taiwan when Yonfan was 5 years old. He spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Taichung, Taiwan, and returned to Hong Kong in 1964 as a 17-year-old man to work as a photographer, but left for the United States in 1968 to study film. After a couple of years travelling through the United States, France and Britain, he returned to Hong Kong in 1973, and became a photographer noted for his celebrity portraits.
After In Between (1994), Yonfan started to steer away from the mainstream market and began to introduced characters from the marginalised section of the society. With 1998 came another milestone, Bishonen, best known for its romantic cinematography and explicit portrayal of homosexual onscreen passion. Inspired by a real-life scandal in which a Hong Kong playboy was found to possess more than a thousand nude photographs of local police officers, this melodramatic tale of redemption polarized film critics in Hong Kong, but was very well received at film festivals around the globe. It also launched the acting career of heartthrob Daniel Wu.
In 2011, Yonfan headed the New Currents jury at the 16th Busan International Film Festival in October.[3] The Festival also hosted a retrospective of the director's films, featuring seven of his restored and re-mastered films from the 1980s through 2000s.[4]
