Richard Fung
Video artist and social critic Richard Fung is one of the nine contemporary artists who have shared their first impressions of Toronto with us for First Impressions: Telling Toronto Stories. This is a joint project of Toronto Arts Council and Heritage Toronto appearing on the TTC throughout 2009 and 2010, through the support of RBC.
Richard Fung is a Toronto-based video artist and writer. His tapes, which include My Mother's Place, Sea in the Blood andIslands amongst numerous others, have been widely screened and collected internationally. He is the co-author (with Monika Kin Gagnon) of "13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics" (Montreal: Artexte), and his essays have been published in many journals and anthologies.
Richard is a winner of the Bell Canada Award for video art, the Toronto Arts Award for media art, and a former Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU and currently is associate professor in the Faculty of Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
Still image from the video Sea in the Blood
"My videos arise from questions that tickle or irritate me. They are conceptual or aesthetic knots that I want to unravel. Making a video gives me the chance to better understand them. While there may be many questions, there are seldom conclusions in my work.
"I got my first job after art school in community television. It was the golden era of that experiment and it shaped my orientation to the medium: giving voice to issues and ideas not in the mainstream of cinema or television; an attention to spectatorship and audience; and a partiality towards the interview. Being ethnically Chinese, from the Caribbean, and gay also induced a self-conscious relationship to the moving image—my reality was seldom reflected on screen.
"Today I feel less of a burden to represent “my” communities, as the pool of film and videomakers is more diverse. But even so, commercial imperatives, creative myopia and political narrow-mindedness increasingly combine to limit the perspectives, stories and aesthetic forms available to us through mass media. And for a whole other set of reasons art galleries, where many exciting ideas find a home, are still not as culturally diverse as they might be.
Still image from the video "My Mother's Place"
"Despite our obvious political and class hierarchies, Toronto is a pretty much a horizontal city: one of neighbourhoods and communities of affinity. Our art scene is characterized by cooperation rather than competition. This is in no small part due to peer-reviewed, arms-length public funding for the arts in Canada. This has been the best way to encourage a range of practices and practitioners. I would not have a career without it."
-Richard