Patrick Sun grew up in Hong Kong at a time when being gay was viewed as a source of familial shame. On coming out to his mother, the real estate developer and art collector was dispatched to a psychiatrist, “not in Hong Kong”, he recounts, to eliminate the risk of others learning about his sexuality. The psychiatrist dispensed sound advice with all the authority of a medical professional, reassuring Sun’s mother about her son’s queer identity. This instance from Sun’s childhood fostered his commitment to dialogue and his sensitivity to community-centric Asian contexts. As founder of the Sunpride Foundation, established in 2014, he uses his art collection to grow awareness and build equal futures for the LGBT community. The Foundation collects queer-themed work and also works by artists who identify as queer.
Sun’s collection endeavours to gradually dismantle the societal effects of homophobic legislation. He firmly believes in the potential of art as a less confrontational form of dialogue. He offers an example from his collection, artist and researcher Ellen Pau’s 1992 film Song of the Goddess, which honours the lives and work of the Cantonese opera duo, Yam Kim-fai and Pak Suet-sin. Inseparable over decades of a career on stage and in films, Yam and Pak established the Sin Fung Ming opera troupe in the 1950s. Yam took on the male roles, playing the romantic counterpart to Pak’s female character. Functioning in the absence of a vocabulary to describe same sex relationships, they became queer icons. When Yam passed away in 1989, Pak organised her funeral. Synopses of Pau’s work report Pak as having displayed a banner at the funeral with the words, “I would die a hundred times in bringing you back to me.”
Sun regularly travels to museums and arts spaces around the world to view their latest exhibitions. The Sunpride Foundation allowed him to combine his two passions, he notes: supporting the queer community and contemporary art. From the outset, he was clear about why he wanted to build a collection. Through the foundation, Sun collaborates with public institutions to mount the Spectrosynthesis series of exhibitions that foreground queer art and perspectives. He has organised three exhibitions so far – at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei (2017), Bangkok Art and Culture Centre (2019), and at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong (2022). On each occasion, these important public venues have attracted audiences who are curious about the work, but also about the lives of queer people. For Sun, even the questions that start as being rooted in entrenched bias are valuable; they become conversation openers that allow him and his collection to unpack those very biases.
These biases are also a product of the region’s shared colonial legacy. Activists and lawyers have waged long struggles against repressive colonial-era laws that criminalised homosexuality. Sun’s native Hong Kong decriminalised homosexuality in 1991. It still doesn’t permit same-sex marriage, though a 2023 Hong Kong court decision recognised the government’s constitutional duty to offer a legal framework for same-sex marriages. India read down portions of Section 377 in 2018, followed by Singapore in 2023; both former colonies are yet to recognise same-sex marriage. “Art is the highest form of hope,” Sun says, quoting German painter Gerhard Richter. He hopes to have his collection travel to other countries in Asia, including India, inspiring reflections on queer visibility and identity in the process.
Video script by Harshali Pagare