SYNOPSIS

In a way, Wayne Yung really is my Chinese-Canadian boyfriend. I met Wayne when I curated my first film festival in 2003 shortly after moving to Amsterdam. I had heard of him from mutual friends who knew he was living in Germany and suggested I look him up being both fellow queer North American Chinese expatriate filmmakers living in Europe. We had a blast at the festival as he generously helped guide a very enthusiastic but very inexperienced festival organizer through lost tapes and bad subtitles. We quickly became partners in crime and over the years, brainstormed of ways to radicalize the Asians and Queers in Europe, to not be ashamed to show their faces and hear their own voices and desires on screen and off. As members of the silent model minority in North America, the so-called “good studious immigrant Asian kids”, we slowly but surely became rebels with a cause. We held queer karaoke “happenings” from Berlin to Amsterdam to show that anyone could make a video, have fun doing it and bring the queer community closer together. In the meantime Wayne also continued making videos about his queer, Asian, and now European identity and life as he became a fusion of different cultures and identities. In his work he has always sought to create dialogue with himself and others about who he is as he has always done in his more than 20 year career of making video art. Wayne is one of the pioneers of the queer video art form and continues to bravely explore his personal life and space to bring us the insights of his discoveries.