Richard Fung

In 2019, he was presented the Bonham Centre Award from The Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, University of Toronto, for his contributions to the advancement and education of issues around sexual identification.

Richard Fung, along with video activists Gregg Bordowitz, Jean Carlomusto, Alexandra Juhasz, and James Wentzy, shared a goal of looking back at the historical developments in AIDS activism and its normalization in North America. Richard Fung's video essay Sea in the Blood (2000) allowed him to show his audience the seriousness of AIDS, documenting his experience of having a close family member battling thalassemia and a partner fighting AIDS. Richard's relationship to thalassemia came about via his sister Nan, and his relationship to AIDS via his partner, Tim McGaskel. Sea in the Blood is a reflection on race, sexuality, and disease, revolving around two trips that significantly affected his life. During the first trip, in 1962, Fung traveled from Trinidad to England with his sister Nan to meet an eminent hematologist interested in her disease. His second trip took place in 1977 when Fung and his partner, Tim McGaskell, made a pilgrimage from Europe to Asia. Nan died before Richard and Tim could return home. Fung's personal accounts are riddled with love, loss, and AIDS. He aimed to avoid sentimentality and lure the audience to feel as he does, through his video essay. Richard uses blood to symbolize HIV/AIDS and thalassemia, as thalassalemia is an inherited blood disorder and HIV/AIDS is a viral blood infection that passes from individual to individual.

In many of Fung's works relating to his family, such as Sea in the Blood (2000), he explores how lesbians and gay men experience being exiled by kinship. The coming-out process provokes fraught relationships between members of LGBT and their families and the AIDS pandemic contributes to an environment of exclusion and disappointment. Fung's works focus widely on queers of colour, drawing predominantly from personal experiences as an Asian homosexual. In My Mother's Place (1990), Fung addresses his relationship with his mother and is made up of disclosures of what to reveal and what to hint at, eliminating details while refraining from committing to lies; being both "inside and outside" the frame of kinship. The queer figure of inside/outside evokes "the structures of alienation, splitting, and identification which together produce a self and an other, subject and an object, an unconscious and a conscious, an interiority and an exteriority ... but the figure inside/outside, which encapsulates the structure of language, repression, and subjectivity, also designates the structure of exclusion, oppression, and repudiation". Queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz writes about In My Mother's Place in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. According to Muñoz, Fung's performances can be understood as "autoethnography" due to their employment of tactics like "postcolonial mimicry" and "hybridity". In Fung's Sea in the Blood, he documents his painful negotiation between having to choose between his blood family and his chosen family (relationship with his partner Tim).

Fung produced a short documentary titled My Mother's Place (1990), a tribute to his mother Rita. The documentary records Rita's Chinese-Trinidadian childhood, and the family's immigration to Canada, while focusing on the formation of Fung's complex identity in the process of coming out to his family.

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

Fung has been published several times in magazines such as Asiandian and Fuse. Early on in his career Fung worked as an animator for community video production, and later became a staff producer at Rogers Cable. After directing his first film, Orientations, Fung joined the DEC Film and Video distribution in 1984 and assisted in Toronto's anti-racism film festival, Colour Positive.

Fung produced his first independent video, Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians in 1984. He produced several videos that won awards and were screened in numerous venues and archived in various locations such as the London Institute of Contemporary Art, Chicago's Art Institute, and the Getty Gallery in Los Angeles.

Through his pieces such as Orientations (1984) and Looking for My Penis (1991), Fung points out how the production of mainstream pornography caters to white viewers. Such constructions reveal power relations emphasizing white supremacy. Fung highlights how mainstream gay porn is more readily available to Asian men than independent productions, disproportionately affecting how gay Asian men view their sexuality. In his video Orientations, Asian men are constructed as sexual subjects as rather than sexual objects. In this Fung addresses Asians as taking charge of their sexuality and sexual interests. Looking For my Penis (1991) explores the importance of having different representations within mainstream commercial porn. Print pornography is often the first introduction to gay sexuality, especially for gay Asian men who are economically and socially disadvantaged, isolated and without support. Current commercial gay porn caters predominantly and almost exclusively to white viewers. Fung points out how this constructs gay identity as exclusively white.

Fung is an activist and founded the Toronto-based organization Gay Asians of Toronto in 1980.

Richard Fung (born 1954) is a video artist, writer, public intellectual and theorist who currently lives and works in Toronto, Ontario. He was born in Port of Spain, Trinidad and is openly gay.