Queering Diasporic Narratives — with Jen Sungshine

Working at the intersection of race, class, gender, sexuality, Jen Sungshine collaborates with fellow Love Intersections artists to celebrate diasporic narratives of queer identities. Jen joins host Am Johal to discuss art making and storytelling as a tool to address systemic racism and build understanding in conversations about gender and sexuality.She shares some recent Love Intersections projects, including Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny, a short documentary following Vancouver drag artist Maiden China and a subsequent visual art installation — both inspired by the Chinese five elements as a framework to explore the artists’ experiences of Chineseness and queerness.Jen Sungshine speaks for a living, but lives for breathing art into spaces, places, cases. She is a queer Taiwanese interdisciplinary artist/activist, facilitator, and community mentor based in Vancouver, BC, and the Co-Creative Director and founder of Love Intersections, a media arts collective dedicated to collaborative filmmaking and relational storytelling. Jen's artistic practice is informed by an ethic of tenderness; instead of calling you out, she wants to call you in, to make (he)artful social change with her. In the audience, she looks for weirdos, queerdos and anti-heroes. In private, she looks after more than 70 houseplants and prefers talking to plants than to people.