Richard Fung, Steam Clean, video, 3:30 min., Canada, 1990
Erica Cho, School Boy Art, Super-8 on digital video, 10:50min., US 2004
Nguyen Tan Hoang, 7 Steps to Sticky Heaven, video, 24:00min., US 1996
Patty Chang & Anie Stanley, Paradice, Super-8 on digital video, 15:00min., US 1996
Lynne Chan, JJ Chinois, video, 5:31min., US 2002

A program that pays tribute to the original "Bad Asians," coined by film scholar Eve Oishi, as a pioneering movement of bold and transgressive queer Asian American artists working in experimental video and film between 1990 - early 2000s. Oishi's seminal essay identified a new movement of queer Asian American artists whom "find their voices through a 'perverse' identification and relationship with popular culture that uncovers, tweaks, and plays with the racialized fantasies, fears, and representations that make culture popular." This program highlights the work of queer Asian American artists within the two "phases" framed by Oishi's publications to offer a historical and aesthetic contextualization of queer experimental filmmaking within the past 25 years. From Richard Fung's GMHC commissioned safe sex PSA Steam Clean, to Nguyen Tan Hoang's experimental documentary and how-to-guide to sticky rice love, "7 Steps to Sticky Heaven," Erica Cho's hot-for-teacher fantasy School Boy Art, Patty Chang and Anie Stanley's Las Vegas romp into low glamour and seedy motel-room encounters, and Lynne Chan's embodiment of midwestern heartthrob in JJ Chinois - these works are uniquely marked by their formalistic and aesthetic re-appropriationg of pop culture, politics of representation, AIDS, camp, and sexual and gender play.


Opening its doors on March 18th, 1967 at its original location on 51-53 Christopher Street, Stonewall Inn was the largest gay establishment in the US at its time. Without a liquor license, running water, or fire exits, Stonewall Inn was the only bar for homosexuals in NYC where dancing was allowed. Merely a few years later, June 28th, 1969 would mark a historic date in LGBTQ history as the site of the Stonewall riots, which has been regarded as the impetus for the gay liberation movement. As the NYPD violently attacked the establishment as an attempt to take it over, a riot ensued for multiple nights, igniting hundreds of members of the LGBTQ community to protest for their rights to space, expression, and liberation. Stonewall veterans Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major, and countless other drag queens, transvestites, and transgender women of color were at the forefront of these riots. In a 2010 interview, Miss Major, a black transgender activist and Stonewall veteran stated, "Don't listen to the white wash hype about Stonewall in 1969. It was black transgender women who where there at the forefront fighting for our human rights as we are still fighting for them today."

Curator: Leeroy Kun Young Kang