Lloyd Wong, Unfinished

In the early 1990s, Lloyd Wong began to make a work based on his experiences living with AIDS in Toronto, but he died from AIDS-related illnesses before completing it. For three decades, his work-in-progress was considered “long lost” until it resurfaced at The Queer ArQuives. In this experimental documentary, Lesley Loksi Chan combines raw footage from Lloyd Wong, whom she considers to be her co-director, with fragments of her research notes, reflecting on what it means to inherit images from queer communities and to attempt to understand someone through multiple takes. Rough and unprocessed, this film explores the meaning of incompletion. Lloyd Wong, Unfinished draws attention to the daily complexities of being a Chinese Canadian gay man living with AIDS in the nineties, underscoring the power of self-representation and the tragedy of silenced voices – voices erased by systemic marginalisation and the HIV/AIDS crisis. By delving into Wong’s unfinished film, this project explores incompletion not as a failure or absence, but as a space for difficult questions, nuanced truths and ongoing dialogue about collective memory. Lloyd Wong, Unfinished is an act of intergenerational witnessing.