Day With(out) Art: Asia Focus

“Day With(out) Art: Asia Focus” brings together an evocative collection of visual stories from Asian and Asian diasporic communities, portraying individuals navigating a world where illness is not simply physical but deeply social and emotional. Selected from videos commissioned for Visual AIDS’s “Day With(out) Art” between 2019 and 2023, the six works situate the experience of living with HIV within social and political contexts shaped by regional and cultural nuances. Employing intimate storytelling methods and diverse visual languages, the program offers a “foreign” yet familiar exploration of identity, social stigma, safety, and love.

Set against the social and medical landscapes of Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, Korea, India, and other Asian diasporic spaces, the films invite viewers to consider the realities of HIV/AIDS beyond Western narratives, expanding our understanding of what these experiences can encompass. Each story unfolds its own universe, where the extraordinary becomes the mundane, and the universal resonates as personal. Across borders and boundaries, these works chart paths previously unseen toward new expressions of community, personal growth, and solidarity, reimagining how we can look at life with HIV/AIDS yesterday, today and tomorrow.

Video Program

Dorothy Cheung - Heart Murmurs (2023)

Heart Murmurs is a poetic dialogue between the filmmaker and Dean, a young man living in Hong Kong. In reflecting on his experience living with a congenital disability and HIV during the first years of the COVID pandemic, Dean expresses his sense of self in the face of regular medical challenges.

Jaewon Kim - Nuance (2022)

Through the unfolding of 42 images, Nuance explores the psychological and emotional dynamics in a relationship between the artist, who is living with HIV, and his HIV-negative partner. The work reveals how tension, anxiety, and intimacy are shaped despite reliable treatment grounded in the science of U=U (undetectable = untransmittable).

Nguyen Tan Hoang - I Remember Dancing (2019)

I Remember Dancing brings together an intergenerational cast of "trans and queer gaysians" ruminating on the past and future of AIDS, activism, gay culture, love, and (un)safe sex. Inspired by Joe Brainard’s I Remember poems, these confessions illuminate perspectives of queer Asian communities often absent from whitewashed narratives of HIV and AIDS. Grief, regret, longing, risk, and pleasure surface as their memories and fantasies blur into one another.

J Triangular and the Women's Video Support Project - 滴水希望 (Hope Drops) (2021)

A collaborative video project made with women living in Taiwan who use their cameras to process stress and stigma, and to share their experiences living with HIV.

Beau Gomez - This Bed I Made (2023)

This Bed I Made presents the bed as a place of solace and agency beyond just a site of illness or isolation. Through the shared stories of two Filipino men living with HIV, the video explores modes of care, restoration, and abundance in the midst of pandemic pervasion.

Charan Singh - They Called it Love, But Was it Love? (2020)

They Called it Love, But Was it Love? depicts scenes from the lives of kothis* living in India. Reduced to a “risk group” by public health campaigns and misunderstood through Western notions of gender and sexuality, these protagonists have real lives and inhabit unique worlds with their own quests for fulfilment and love.

* In the introduction to his ongoing portrait series Kothis, Hijras, Giriyas and Others, Charan Singh defines the words kothi, hijra, and giriya as “indigenous terms used by queer working class and transgendered people in their own dialect to define their different and particular sexual identities.”

Gian Cruz, Dear Kwong Chi (2024)

In Dear Kwong Chi, Cruz creates a video letter to the late artist Tseng Kwong Chi, drawing from the experience of living with HIV in diaspora. Across continents and decades, Kwong Chi’s legacy acts as an anchor for Cruz amongst limited representations of Asian narratives in AIDS histories.