Queer artists Shitou (ethnic Miao) and Mingming (ethnic Gelao) will present photo and video stories depicting their plant-based food and farming experiments, accompanied by Southwest mountain folk songs from China.

The artist couple’s audio-video experiment intricately weaves together their queer visions of organic organizing everyday life in an organic manner, showcasing their multifaceted, creative, and de-commercialized engagements with life and art.

About the artists

Shitou (born 1969) is a Chinese activist, performer, filmmaker, multimedia artist, and queer icon. She has been active in the Chinese LGBTQ+ scene since the 1990s and was the first lesbian to come out on Chinese television. After starring in the lesbian-themed film Fish and Elephant, Shitou directed several films, many in collaboration with her life partner, Mingming: such as Dyke March (2002), Women Fifty Minutes (2006) and We Are Here (2015). Shitou and Mingming are co-initiators of the China Queer Independent Film group (CQIF, 2008). They are currently Artist-in-Residency at Malmö Konsthall (Jan-Mar 2024) after three months residency at Konstepidemin Götebory (Oct-Dec 2023).

Moderator

Jinyan Zeng is a documentary filmmaker and a Replacement Lecturer (formerly Postdoctoral Fellow) at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality, culture and politics, intellectual identity and social activism, and ethnicity, with particular emphasis on China.

References

Bao, Hongwei. 2020a. “‘We Are Here’: The Politics of Memory in Narrating China’s Queer Feminist History.” Continuum (Mount Lawley, W.A.) 34 (4): 514–29.

———. 2020b. “Women Fifty Minutes: In Search of Queer Women’s Spaces.” In Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Visual Culture under Postsocialism, 46–66. New York: Routledge.

Huang, Xin. 2018. “I Am a Rock: Shi Tou’s Life Story.” In The Gender Legacy of the Mao Era: Women’s Life Stories in Contemporary China, 121–70. New York: State University of New York Press.

Zeng, Jinyan. 2024. ‘Queering Community: Affect of Visuality in the Sinosphere’. Journal of Chinese Cinemas. 

This event is co-organized with Malmö konsthall.