Queer Gradients

Queer Gradients is a public program about LGBT+ activism, film and art. Acclaimed speakers and presenters are Chinese LGBT+ activists/filmmakers He Xiaopei and Sun Mo, and Dutch design collective Pink Pony Express. The program is moderated by Stijn Deklerck of Amnesty International.

During the last 20+ years, China’s civil society has seen a large development of LGBT+ activism. The queer movement has had to encounter numerous challenges, such as how to contend with a shrinking space for public discourse, increasing pressures from the state and brutal crackdowns on all manners of dissent, widespread LGBT+ censorship and a persisting conservative moral order that leaves little room for openly living one's queerness.

This event offers a unique opportunity to hear directly from artists and activists working in China, and to see and appreciate their achievements. Faced with huge obstacles, they find ever new and creative ways to negotiate the boundaries in a highly authoritarian state, with art becoming a primary means to nudge society and government towards LGBT+ equality. Their work paints a bright picture made up of countless gradients that come to terms with the binaries of censorship/expression, identity/fluidity, consent/dissent, art/activism.

He Xiaopei is a leading queer feminist filmmaker, activist, and director of Pink Space (粉色空间), a Beijing-based NGO dedicated to promoting sexual rights and gender equality. Her films include 'The Lucky One' (宠儿, 2012), 'Our Marriages: Lesbians Marry Gay Men' (奇缘一生, 2013), 'Yvo and Chrissy' (如此生活, 2017), and 'Playmates' (玩伴, 2019). As one of China’s leading feminist and queer activists since the 1990s, He’s experiences and perspectives offer a unique view on the formation of queer identities, communities, and activism in the People’s Republic of China over the past three decades.  

From 2015 to 2016, Sun Mo worked as media manager for the Beijing LGBT center, a nonprofit organization focused on advancing gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights in China. He is intimately familiar with China’s systemic use of censorship on queer issues, and with the ways used by Chinese NGOs to continue their queer activism despite the overall societal and political pressure. In 2016, he moved to Germany, where he works for a Berlin art studio doing editing, photography and film production. In 2018 he produced the documentary 'Block and Censor’ (Chen Awei, China, 2018), a film based on the lawsuit undertaken by queer filmmaker Fan Popo against the Chinese censors after they blocked one of his films online. 

Pink Pony Express is a design collective, based in Amsterdam. Their projects are based on locations where there is friction - usually between the government and local citizens. 

Following a period of long-term research that includes living and working on these locations, Pink Pony Express makes images that help redefine the situation, and create a shift in the current perspective.

Recently they did a few projects in China, and created (amongst others) a mobile application which, based on meteorological data, predicts when and where rainbows over China will appear. This meteorological protest shows how politics can’t force nature.

Stijn Deklerck is a sinologist working on human rights in China. His main research focus is on activism in China’s contemporary LGBT+ movement. He worked for more than 10 years in Chinese civil society, built up extensive activist experience as a core member of various queer NGOs, and is an accomplished producer of socially engaging documentaries on China. He currently teaches on Chinese law, politics and history at the universities of Leuven and Liège (Belgium), and works at Amnesty International Netherlands as senior officer human rights programmes.

Queer Gradients is organized in partnership with Amnesty International, and is kindly supported by CinemAsia.