Filmmakers and Producers

Richard Fung

Richard Fung is a Toronto-based video artist, writer, theorist and educator. His work comprises of a series of challenging videos on subjects ranging from the role of the Asian male in gay pornography to colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, AIDS and his own family history. His work, which include MY MOTHER'S PLACE (1990), SEA IN THE BLOODd (2000) and UNCOMFORTABLE (2005), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada and the United States.

His essays have been published in many journals and anthologies, and he is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of "13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics" (2002), recently updated and translated into French. Richard is a past Rockefeller Fellow at New York University and has received the Bell Canada Award for Lifetime Achievement in Video as well as the Toronto Arts Award for Media Art.

Fung has always seen himself as much as an educator as an artist, and in Helen Lee’s essay ‘Dirty Dozen: Playing 12 Questions with Richard Fung’ from "Like Mangoes in July: The Work of Richard Fung" (Images Festival and Insomniac Press, 2002), Fung says he aims to produce work which is ‘pedagogical, but hopefully not pedantic’. Richard is a public intellectual who has pushed forward the debates about queer sexuality, Asian identity and the uneasy borderlands of culture and politics.

Fung holds a degree in cinema studies as well as an ME in sociology and cultural studies, both from the University of Toronto. He is Associate Professor in the Integrated Media program at the Ontario College of Art and Design.

AVAILABLE FROM TWN

Dal Puri Diaspora
Richard Fung
2012, 80 min., Color, Canada
The recipe for dal puri traveled with indentured workers from India’s Gangetic plain to southern Caribbean colonies of Britain and the Netherlands in the 19th Century. In the 1960s the wrapped roti migrated from Trinidad to North America, where it is known as Caribbean or West Indian roti and is pop...

Orientations
Richard Fung
Producer: Gay Asians Toronto
1985, 56 min., Color, Canada
More than a dozen men and women of different Asian backgrounds speak frankly about their lives as members of a minority within a minority. They speak about coming out, homophobia, racism, cultural identity and the ways that being gay and Asian have shaped who they are. Active in Canadian lesbian a...

Re:Orientations
Richard Fung
2016, 68 min., Color, Canada
A fascinating look into the lives and thoughts of seven Queer Pan-Asian Canadians as they look back on ORIENTATIONS, a 1984 documentary in which they featured. How have they changed? And how has the world around them evolved and changed?

In 1984, Richard Fung released his seminal first ...


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