Richard Fung is a video artist and cultural critic, born and raised in Port of Spain and based in Toronto. His single-channel tapes such as My Mother’s Place (1990), Sea in the Blood (2000) and Uncomfortable: The Art of Christopher Cozier (2005), have been widely screened and collected internationally, and have been broadcast in Canada and the United States. His video installations, which include Jehad in Motion and Landscapes, have been mounted in Canada and Japan. He is the co-author with Monika Kin Gagnon of 13: Conversations on Art and Cultural Race Politics and his essays have been published in numerous journals and anthologies. Richard was a Rockefeller Fellow at the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University and has received the Bell Canada Award for Video Art and the Toronto Arts Award for Media Art, among other honours. He is an associate professor in the Faculty of Art at the Ontario College of Art and Design.
I began my university studies in geography and I have an abiding interest in space and place. Of late I have been particularly fascinated by Toronto as an urban site, and through a handful of projects have begun exploring its organization, surfaces and demographic textures across spatial and temporal dimensions. For example, in "Jehad in Motion", a two-screen video installation, we follow the eponymous Palestinian Canadian simultaneously through the two cities he calls home—Toronto and the West Bank hub of Hebron—juxtaposing places of shopping, work, leisure and family in the two cities. In Landscapes, I mined the relationship of fine art, urban planning and colonialism through a pastiche of J.M.W. Turner’s painting of Scarborough, Yorkshire and contemporary video footage of Scarborough, Ontario.
For this residency, I am developing a video installation as part of The Leona Drive Project, engaging with a house on a street slated for demolition. Leona Drive was built in the late 1940s and sold mainly to veteran soldiers from WWII and their young families. My parents bought a house in the same development in 1976 and lived there until their deaths. I have been conducting oral histories with residents and former residents, and will look at the house as a container of memories and longing.
- Richard Fung
