Yellow Peril: Reimagining Queer Asian Futures | Film Screening Panel with Love Intersections

Event recording of Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny 2.0 film screening panel discussion, featuring Dr. Helen Leung, David Ng, Jen Sungshine and Kendell Yan (Maiden China).

Love Intersections hosted an intergenerational film screening of Richard Fung’s Re:Orientations (2016) x Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny (2019), and a special premiere of 2 bonus chapters - Yellow Peril: Queer Futures (2022). Featuring filmmakers and Maiden China reflecting on the original film and its mutations in the context of COVID-19 related anti-Asian violence, the screening will be followed by a panel on intergenerational queer East Asian solidarity and community building.

Speaker Biographies

Helen Hok-Sze Leung is a Professor and Chair in the Department of Gender, Sexuality & Women’s Studies and co-director of the Institute for Transpacific Cultural Research at Simon Fraser University. She has published widely on Asian cinemas and queer cultural productions and is the author of two books. She also co-edits the HKUP Queer Asia book series and hosts the podcast Transpacific Stories. She is currently working on a SSHRC-funded research project on Transpacific Film Cities.

Kendell Yan/ Maiden China is an intersectional feminist drag performer who disrupts identity expectations and liberates audiences by inducing vulnerability. Maiden China’s drag explores the concept of the “hyphen”, liminal states of embodied being, and incorporates elements of classical Chinese opera, queer theory, resistance politics, and intimate contact performance art. They are the winner of the Mx Cobalt All Star competition, and Vancouver’s Entertainer of the year 2018. They are a member of the upper house of the Dogwood Monarchist Society’s 48th reign as Imperial Crown Prince, and they perform regularly as a member of the House of Rice, an all Asian drag family in Vancouver, BC. as well as one of the Darlings, a non-binary drag collective.

Jen Sungshine is a queer Taiwanese-Canadian interdisciplinary artist/activist, community facilitator, and cultural producer based in Vancouver, BC. She is the Co-Artistic Director and Co-founder of Love Intersections, a media arts collective producing intergenerational + intersectional QTBIPOC stories through documentary film. Her most recent works include Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny (2019), winner of the Gerry Brunet Memorial Award for best BC Short; and visual arts exhibit, Yellow Peril; Celestial Elements (2020) at the SUM Gallery. She is a co-producer of CURRENT: Feminist Electronic Art Symposium, Hot Pot Talks, and serves on the board of Vancouver Artists Labour Union Cooperative (VALU CO-OP). She is currently public programming for the Ghosts of the Machine exhibition (Jun 3-Aug 14) at The Polygon Gallery. www.jensungshine.com

David Ng is a queer, feminist, media artist, and co-Artistic Director of Love Intersections - an arts collective made up of queer people of colour. His current artistic practices grapple with queer, racialized, and diasporic identity, and how intersectional identities can be expressed through media arts. His interests include imagining new possibilities of how queer racialized artists can use their practice to transform communities.