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Richard Fung

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Education

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Richard finished his undergrad at the University of Toronto, and received a ME in sociology and cultural studies. He is currently an Associate Professor at OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design.[1]

Early Life and Family

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Richard Fung is Trinidad-born artist, writer, theorist and educator, based in Toronto. Richard focuses his work towards challenging videos in regards to the role of the Asian males in gay pornography, colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS and his own family history. Many of his works have been presented at the international level within Canada and the United states.[1]

Richard has also produced a short documentary called My Mother’s Place (1990), that pays respects to his mother Rita. It is a record of Rita’s Chinese-Trinidadian childhood, to their immigration to Canada. The documentary also focused around Richard Fung as a complex character, as he ‘comes out’ to his family by opening up about his sexuality, and their family’s history of queer epistemology.[2]

Influences

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AIDS

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Richard Fung along with video activists Gregg Bordowitz, Jean Carlomusto, Alexandra Juhasz, and James Wentzy, had the goal to thoughtfully looking back at the historical change of AIDS activism and normalization, in North America over the series of many years.[3] In one way, Richard Fung’s Sea in the Blood’s (2000) video essay, gave him the chance to show his audience the seriousness of AIDS, by documenting his experience of a close family member and partner that fought with AIDS and thalassemia.[3] Sea in the Blood is a reflection on race, sexuality, and disease. Richard has a personal relationship to thalassemia in his sister Nam, and AIDS partner Tim McGaskel. His documentary revolved around two trips that made an impact in his life.[4] The first trip was when Richard traveled from Trinidad to England with his sister Nan, to meet a famous hematologist that was interested in her disease in 1962.[5] His second trip took place in 1977 when Richard and his partner Tim McGaskell, made a pilgrimage from Europe to Asia. Nan died before Richard and Tim’s returned home.[5] The narrative of Richard’s personal accounts are riddled with love, loss, and AIDS. Richard aimed to avoid sentimentality and lure the audience to feel as he does- though his documentary.[6] Richard uses blood to symbolize HIV/AIDS and thalassaemia, as they are both bacterium conditions that pass from individual to individual.[7] Fung uses his video essays as platform to create narratives of the seriousness of AIDS and the damage that it can do physically to an individual, and loved ones around them.

Asian Homosexuality

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Steam Clean (1990) is a videography by Richard Fung, commissioned by the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC) of New York, and the AIDS Committee of Toronto.[8] This work focuses on the discourse of sexual performance, and the intersectional nature of identity and political practise.[8] Steam Clean is a safe sex tape geared towards Asian men, that show two men having sex in a steam room.[8] Richard aims to encourage the practise of safe sex in the lives of the gay Asian community, by addressing the discourse around queer culture- such as homophobia.[8] The sauna in which where the videography of instructional porn is used to create a space that guides viewers into what feels like a seminar room, for the discussion of safe sex by young community educators.[9] Richard Fung’s use of the sauna as a setting is what some call ‘homoscape,’ which are streams of cultural material moving back and forth from national boundaries of perceived stabilities.[10] His use of the sauna as a space was aimed not only as a space of sex, but as a “ narrative [for] conventions and expectations, [where] the conjugal drive is resolved.”[10] His focus was to direct the viewer's focus towards the ‘ethnoscape’ and ‘homoscape’ on the premise of how they overlap in a dynamic way “of rootedness, coalition, and intervention.”[11]

References

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  1. ^ a b "Biography". n.d. Retrieved 2 November 2015. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  2. ^ Pidduck, Julianne (2009). "Queer Kinship and Ambivalence: Video Autoethnographies by Jean Carlomusto and Richard Fung". 15 (3): 455. Retrieved 2 November 2015. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  3. ^ a b Hallas, Roger (2010). "Queer Aids Media and The Question of The Archive". A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies. 16 (3): 432. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help)
  4. ^ Lawless, Katherine (2012). "(Re)circulating Foreign Bodies". 12 (1): 120. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  5. ^ a b Lawless, Katherine (2012). "(Re)circulating Foreign Bodies". 12 (1): 120. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  6. ^ Lawless, Katherine (2012). "(Re)circulating Foreign Bodies". 12 (1): 121. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  7. ^ Lawless, Katherine (2012). "(Re)circulating Foreign Bodies". 12 (1): 122. {{cite journal}}: |access-date= requires |url= (help); Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  8. ^ a b c d Waugh, Thomas (1998). "Good Clean Fung". 20 (2): 166. Retrieved 2 November 2015. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  9. ^ Waugh, Thomas (1998). "Good Clean Fung". 20 (2): 168. Retrieved 2 November 2015. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  10. ^ a b Waugh, Thomas (1998). "Good Clean Fung". 20 (2): 168–169. Retrieved 2 November 2015. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  11. ^ Waugh, Thomas (1998). "Good Clean Fung". 20 (2): 174. Retrieved 2 November 2015. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)

Bibliography

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