Richard Fung

Born - Trinidad

Richard Fung is a Toronto-based video artist, writer, theorist and educator. He 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. 

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 tapes, which include My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (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.

Artist Collection List

Title Year Runtime Collection
Chinese Characters 1986 21 minutes Single Titles
Dirty Laundry 1996 30 minutes 42 seconds Single Titles
Fighting Chance 1991 30 minutes Single Titles
Islands 2002 8 minutes 45 seconds Single Titles
My Mother's Place 1990 49 minutes 50 seconds Single Titles
Nang by Nang 2018 40 minutes 19 seconds Single Titles
Orientations: Lesbian and Gay Asians 1984 56 minutes Single Titles
School Fag 1998 16 minutes 35 seconds Single Titles
Sea in the Blood 2000 26 minutes Single Titles
Steam Clean 1991 4 minutes Single Titles
The Way to My Father's Village 1988 38 minutes Single Titles
Uncomfortable: The Art of Christopher Cozier 2005 47 minutes 38 seconds On Art and Artists, Single Titles