Works by students in "IMAGINING QUEER ASIAN FUTURITIES" 2023 Summer Class, Art, and Social Change Program, OCAD U.
Artist Work: Alicia Lee, THEZENANNA, Gia-Waihan Naccarato, Saruye, Raymond Lise, Raha Fard, Niko Ionescu, River Fujimoto, Levi Hwang, Simrat Marwaha, Fai Illusri, Shing Ge, Mason Zhao, Jessie Li & Carson Zhang.
https://express.adobe.com/page/T0bjnXD773HNE/
This show explores diverse lived experiences of Asians, Transcultural, and Queer bodies. Interrogating and critically questioning the ideologies of Pride Queer Narratives in its whiteness, sameness, gender prescripted ideas, homonormative representations, and the furthering of otherness and exoticism of queer Asian Bodies. The title of the show derived from a conversation in class that critiques the idea of Pride in the Queer Community and how most of our experiences as queer Asians reflect on the word that often narrates a different lived experience, one that evokes shame and the prejudice that comes from communities that still uphold a very narrow perspective of queerness in homonormativity, and often times homonationalist ideologies.
These series of works offer us a glimpse of narratives that most queer Asians and queer bodies face in an ever-changing community that begs to ask for space to be heard and be visible not to become a fetishized idea of visibility and acceptance. Challenging our notions of queerness outside its westernized perspectives that suppress and exoticize narratives within the Asian Continents. These imagine spaces of hope and kinship that construct possibilities for a more inclusive understanding and knowledgeable future for queer communities to have an equitable possible imagined space for queer Asian futurities.
These works are a blend of varied creative practices from students that span from Graduate and undergraduate studies in various practices from Life Studies, Design, Drawing and Painting, Integrated Media, Experimental Animation, Creative Writing, and curatorial studies. Both within the LGBTQ2S+ Asian communities as well as allies of the LGBTQ2S+ Asian community.