Originated in the US following the Stonewall uprising of June 1969 in New York City’s Greenwich Village, the Pride Month has been celebrated globally every year in June since 1970. With colourful parades, festivals, workshops, exhibitions and parties, the Pride Month is a way to commemorate years of struggles for civil rights and advocate for equal rights, to support the LGBTQ+ community and to celebrate inclusivity.
In 2023, the Gay Games were organised in Hong Kong – the first time ever the worldwide event was held in an Asian country. A tree that hides a small forest, this milestone event was part of the city’s ongoing effort to increase its support to the LGBTQ+ culture.
While queer and gay stories have historically seen less mainstream representation in Hong Kong, some local figures and homegrown artists are pushing the boundaries, expressing and nurturing queer identities and culture.
At the forefront of the movement is Patrick Sun, Hong Kong property developer and art collector. Previously collecting traditional Chinese ink art, Sun pivoted in 2014 and created the Sunpride Foundation with the aim to support queer Asian art and to use art as a force for social change.
Growing up in Hong Kong, a rather conservative city, Sun didn’t have access to queer art in public institutions. A life-changing experience for him was when Hong Kong iconic singer and actor Leslie Cheung casually mentioned his boyfriend on a TV show in the late 1980s, showing “to all the uncles and aunties that gay people live a normal life”.
This influenced Sun’s views on visual arts that can be a way to open a dialogue with people, often in a less-confrontational way. Through the Sunpride Foundation, Sun collects and exhibits artworks to increase LGBTQ+ representation, encouraging and inspiring young artists to take action and create positive changes for the gay and queer community.
A member of the Tate’s Asia-Pacific Acquisitions Committee, the Guggenheim’s Asian Art Circle and M+’s Council for New Art, Patrick Sun has collaborated with Asian institutions and museums in the past few years to organise LBGTQ-themed exhibitions, such as Myth Makers – Spectrosynthesis III, the first major exhibition dedicated to LGBTQ+ art in Hong Kong, held at Tai Kwun in 2022.
Another prominent member of Hong Kong’s LGBTQ+ community is Ellen Pau, pioneering multimedia artist, curator and researcher, who plays a central role in the promotion, curation and education of art and culture in the city.
She started making videos in the 1980’s, exploring femininity, queer romance and politics. Her 1992’s video Song of The Goddess celebrated the romance of the two female Cantonese Opera singers Yam Kim Fai and Pak Suet-Sin between the 1940s and 60s. By staging queer love in a traditional Chinese setting, Pau addressed the ambiguous sexuality representation in popular entertainment, as well as a taboo in Chinese culture.
In 2022, her movie 52Hz was part of the exhibition Myth Makers – Spectrosynthesis III, organised by Patrick Sun at Tai Kwun. Through the journey of a whale named “52Hz”, the story is a tribute to two Hong Kong schoolgirls who died by suicide after their relationship was discovered.
In another vein, artist, photographer and creative director Kary Kwok likes to refer himself as an “in-between”: in between art and fashion, in between man and woman, in between light and dark, in between photography and image-making.
In the 1990s, Kwok photographed many celebrities for the fashion magazine Amoeba. In parallel to his commercial work, Kwok became the unofficial photographer of the queer nightlife in Hong Kong, like at Disco Disco, the legendary nightclub in Lan Kwai Fong from 1978 to 1986.
He was also taking photographs of himself, staging androgynous self-portraits exploring the ideas of sexuality and identity. In an iconic series, he dressed up as a maid to subvert the idea that Asian people are submissive. He wanted to express how he felt in society as a queer Asian artist.
Trevor Yeung, who represents Hong Kong at the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, is more of an observer and decoder of gay culture. He is known for using plants as a medium to address the notions of normativity and control within human social interactions.
In his latest exhibition at Para Site, Soft Breath (extended until 30 June), Yeung links the “fuck tree”, a London gay cruising hotspot, to the Lam Tseun Wishing Tree, evoking the fluid interplay between night and day, public and private life, and hidden and visible desires.
Fascinated by the unspoken rules of gay cruising culture, Yeung relates Soft breath to his wider interest in decoding systems. While these experiences might be unique to gay culture, the emotions they conjure are not…
To know more about the Sunpride Foundation, visit their website here.
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