Richard Fung

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 McCaskell.[14] Sea in the Blood is a reflection on race, sexuality, and disease, revolving around two trips that significantly affected his life.[15] 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 McCaskell, 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.[16] 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.[17]

During the breakout of AIDS in the United States, those surrounding Fung in Canada often said there was no real danger to gay men in their country. Little did Fung know, a plethora of Asian men around him were HIV+, and some even died. Focusing specifically on racism and AIDS in the Asian community, Fung realized that their side was being ignored in the narrative that has primarily been about white gay men. Fung attributes this obliviousness to the stereotype that Asian men in general are not sexual beings, and therefore cannot be homosexual. The degree at which social stigma takes place is bringing about the sort of shame and seclusion that has ravished the community during this time period.[18]

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.[19] 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.[19] 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."[19] 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".[19]

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.[20]

Growing up in Trinidad, Fung attended a Catholic-based school which solidified his views about race and class and its effects in any given society.[18] He moved for secondary school and Canada for university. In Canada Fung met his future partner, Tim McGaskell, at a Marxist study group. The family expectation that Fung would be an architect did not become reality. He attempted to study industrial design but instead entered the photoelectric arts department at the Ontario College of Art.

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.[21] Fung's works focus widely on queers of colour, drawing predominantly from personal experiences as an Asian homosexual.[22] 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.[23] 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".[24] 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".[25] 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).[26]

Most of Fung's videos touch on his family use a style of predominantly personal narration and an impassive scientific account that illustrates how intimate family histories are shaped by race, ethnicity, and colonialism. His videos pull on subtle imagery, such as the use of waves and the sea (Fung on the beach with Nan as a child and later swimming with his lover Tim). The use of waves and the sea are fluids symbolizing not only the blood as a bearer of illness (Nan's rare blood disease thalassemia and Tim's battle with AIDs), but as a site of pleasure, barriers, and his family's immigration to Canada.[27] In Fung's essay, "Programming the Public", he explores the politics of addressing the audience in his works. Highlighting how gender- or race-based programming must weigh the "phenomenal pleasure of collectively consuming identity-based programs addressing 'you' against the challenge of achieving 'mixed' and formally varied programs that construct new horizons of reception and attract new audiences." Exploring the conflicts between genders, ethnicities, racial differences and divergent communities of tastes, Fung touches on how presentation of film and video and its reception reflect paradoxes of identity, access, and power. Audience reception is then rooted in ones' status and language, reflecting a hierarchical ladder of differences based on gender, race, and class.[28]