Born in Hong Kong, Yau Ching is known as a scholar, poet, and film/video artist. While managing her multiple identities, she has been making socially engaged work for more than three decades. She has authored more than thirteen books, including award-winning poetry collections, and produced and directed more than ten films/videos. She studied in Hong Kong, New York and London, and has taught in Hong Kong, Michigan and Taiwan. She has also been actively involved in community organizing including co-founding an educational organization for sexual minorities in Hong Kong, co-founding a Sex Workers’ Film Festival and a Women’s Theatre Festival in Hong Kong, and the Asian Lesbian Film Festival in Taiwan, among others.

Before academia, Yau Ching has worked as instructor and consultant for Gay Men’s Health Crisis’ “Living with AIDS” cable show, as translator for multinational corporations, as editor for film magazine in Hong Kong, and on the side, an independent film/videomaker. Her film/video works have been invited to venues including Alexanderplatz Station of the Berlin Underground, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, Galarie nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, and broadcast in North America, Europe and Japan. Some of them are in the permanent collections of the Asian Film Archive in Singapore, Tate Library in London, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and M+ in Hong Kong. Her video Flow, was curated by MoMA into the exhibition “Signals: How Video Transformed the World.”

As a writer, she has been invited to Singapore Writers’ Festival, Lucas Artists Residency Program, and Taipei Poetry Festival. Her poems have been translated and featured in international literary venues and publications including World Literature Today, Asymptote, Catamaran, Transpacific Literary Project, and Center for the Art of Translation, among others. She is one of the four winners of the 2020 Words Without Borders–Academy of American Poets Poems in Translation Contest.

Yau Ching has taught at the University of California, San Diego, University of Michigan, School of Visual Arts in New York, Royal Holloway College of the University of London, Hong Kong Lingnan University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and at the National Central University, Taiwan. She has also been a Visiting Scholar at Academia Sinica, and at the Center for Chinese Studies in Taiwan, as well as an Honorary Professor in Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese cinemas and TV dramas, and literary and colonial modernities. She plays Go/weiqi unprofessionally.

Artist Code: 325