The world's first Chinese-language queer museum and archive

  • Crossing to the Other Shore
  • The Unfinished
  • Opening ceremony and arts programme
  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3

Welcome to OUT Museum

Why an OUT Museum?

OUT Museum is the world's first Chinese-language queer museum and archive. What matters is not the size of the space or the number of objects it holds, but the practice of coming “out”: acting so that community history comes alive and individual voices carry.

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer lives across the Chinese-speaking world have long been overlooked, and much of the work and many of the objects that document them are scattered or lost. OUT Museum takes the Chinese-language context as its centre, and works to preserve queer creation, everyday life, social movements and cultural production as seen from within it. It also gathers the art, documents and stories of LGBTQ Chinese people, migrants and diaspora communities, becoming a bridge between queer experiences across regions and linking the lives of different generations. Above all, it turns community memory into public presence, keeps Chinese-language queer history in motion, and builds and questions the stories we tell today — so that everyone can find understanding, dialogue and resonance here.

OUT Museum is a reminder that even at the furthest margins, Chinese-language queer communities have never lost their resilience or their will to resist.

  1. 2020 Beginning
  2. 2024 Testing the water
  3. 2025 Gathering strength
  4. 2026 Opening

Advisory statements

Hear more voices

As a Chinese immigrant who has worked in public service, I have seen how community power takes root between policy and culture, and I know how hard it is for marginalised communities to be heard. Chinatown is where East Asian culture, history and identity converge — and yet East Asian queer voices are hard to find here. OUT Museum is creating a visible space, recording stories that cross identity, gender and culture, and holding on to respect for marginalised experience and to free expression. Let people see for themselves how art can be a bridge to social change and mutual understanding.

Mabel Teng

“Out” is a queer survival strategy; it also witnesses Asian communities' relentless pursuit of their dreams. OUT ｜出｜MUSEUM plays a vital role in preserving Chinese queer history and promoting queer Asian cultural production and scholarly research.

Dr Hongwei Bao

We see LGBTQ art as a form of public expression: personal experience can enter public view, and marginal narratives can be taken seriously. Our work has always started from lesbian life, from women's desire and bodies, and it reaches into the tangled feelings that come with Chinese and migrant identity in movement, rupture and reassembly. OUT Museum does more than preserve the past — it leaves room for lives that have not yet been fully told, and makes public action something that keeps happening.

Shitou and Mingming

As a curator working across cultures, I know how often voices with multiple identities are left out of mainstream narratives. Ethnicity, gender, sexuality, migration and family memory are woven together, and that makes many people's stories hard to truly hear. I believe OUT Museum and its archive are not only a space that preserves Chinese-language LGBTQ history, but a rare and precious practice: it respects people's authority over their own narratives, acknowledges the tensions that cultural difference brings, and lets lives lived between languages, borders and identities be seen again, each on their own terms.

Hoi Leung
  • Mabel Teng

    Chinese American public figure and social movement leader

  • Dr Hongwei Bao

    Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Nottingham

  • Shitou and Mingming

    Lala (lesbian) artists, queer activists and filmmakers

  • Hoi Leung

    Curator, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco

OUT Museum in 3D

3D archive of the 2024 OUT Museum pilot exhibition
A 3D scan of the 2024 pilot exhibition: a long table and chairs in front of a pink gallery wall

In tribute

To those who built with us in 2020

Our sincere thanks to the friends from every walk of life who supported us in those first years.

Thank you for becoming a co-builder of the Chinese Queer Museum in 2020, and for taking the most precious first step in this history with us.

Your contribution laid the foundation for the museum's founding and for everything that followed;
you are the reason our conviction holds.

We cannot name each of you in public, but your support is recorded in the museum's history.

We look forward to going on together, in the way we have always wanted.

— Chinese Queer Museum

With thanks to

  • Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco
  • 41 Ross
  • Edge on the Square
  • QWOCMAP
  • Wild Projects
  • Ling Ling
  • Queer China Archive
  • OUT PRESS