Advisory Statements
OUT Museum’s advisors come from public service, academic research, artistic practice and curatorial work. Below are their words to the museum.
Mabel Teng is one of the most pioneering Chinese American public figures and social movement leaders, long active in immigrant rights and LGBTQ rights. As San Francisco’s Assessor-Recorder she presided over the city’s first same-sex marriage ceremony in 2004, and her office issued marriage licences to thousands of same-sex couples — a series of weddings later known as San Francisco’s “Winter of Love”, which advanced marriage equality in California and across the United States. 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.
Dr Hongwei Bao, Associate Professor at the University of Nottingham and author of Queer China and Queer Asian Diasporas. “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.
Shitou and Mingming are lala (lesbian) artists, queer activists and filmmakers based in mainland China. Since the 1990s they have made art and documentaries about lesbian life, desire and the feminist movement — among them the film Fish and Elephant and a body of installation work — and remain key participants in, and chroniclers of, Chinese tongzhi culture and activism from its earliest days to the present. 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.
Curator at the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. Hoi has built a distinctive practice around the contemporary art of the Asian diaspora, nurturing emerging artists and designing community engagement programmes in immigrant neighbourhoods, working towards a healthy, sustainable and imaginative arts ecosystem. 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.