OCEANIC ASIAS, Richard Fung: Artists in Conversation
About this Event
Richard Fung and Shani Mootoo
Thursday, October 15, 2026 | 5:30 PM
Djavad Mowafaghian World Arts Centre (Room 2555)
SFU Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
149 W Hastings St., Vancouver
Please join distinguished queer Asian Trinidadian Canadian artists Richard Fung, Professor Emeritus, OCADU and Shani Mootoo, Ellen and Warren Tallman Writer-in-Residence SFU, for a wide-ranging conversation about art, activism, and friendship.
Oceanic Asias: Richard Fung is presented as part of the Global Asias 30th Anniversary Speaker Series & the Margaret Lowe Benston Lecture Series in Social Justice.
Supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, SFU David Lam Centre, SFU Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies, SFU Global Asia Program, and SFU Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology.
Richard Fung is a video artist, filmmaker and writer, and Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Art at OCAD University. His work probes the intersection of queer sexualities and pan-Asian identities, the history and politics of Caribbean culture, global justice, and his own multi-generational, multiracial Chinese Trinidadian family. He is a co-founder of Gay Asians of Toronto in 1980 and has been active in many queer and anti-racism organizations, most recently around justice for Palestinians. Among other honors, he is the recipient of the 2000 Bell Canada Award for outstanding achievement in video art, the 2015 Kessler Award for significant contribution to LGBTQ Studies and the Bonham Centre Award for distinguished contribution to the public understanding of sexual diversity in Canada.
Shani Mootoo, born in Ireland and raised in Trinidad, relocated to Canada in her early twenties. She earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Western Ontario, now Western University, in 1980 and a Master of Arts in English and Theatre from the University of Guelph in 2010. She practiced initially as a video maker and visual artist, and has more recently concentrated on novel writing, poetry and photo-based work. Her novels include Starry Starry Night, Polar Vortex, and Cereus Blooms at Night. A four-time nominee for the Giller Prize, her work has been long-listed for the Booker Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for the Lambda Literary Prize. Her poetry books include Oh Witness Dey!, Cane | Fire, and The Predicament of Or. Mootoo has served as writer-in-residence at universities internationally. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Western University, is a recipient of Lambda Literary's James Duggins Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize, the Writers' Trust Engel Findley Award, The National Library’s Library and Archives Scholar Award and the Blue Metropolis Violet Literary Prize. She is the 2026-2027 Tallman Writer-in-Residence at Simon Fraser University.
For purposes of documentation this event may be photographed, audio recorded, and/or filmed. By attending this event, you consent to such recording media and its release, publication, exhibition or reproduction.
At Simon Fraser University, we live and work on the unceded traditional territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh Úxwumixw (Squamish), səl̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), q̓íc̓əy̓ (Katzie), kʷikʷəƛ̓əm (Kwikwetlem), Qayqayt, Kwantlen, Semiahmoo and Tsawwassen peoples.
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