Patrick Sun’s collecting practice became a cultural institution with a clear purpose: to make room for LGBTQ+ stories in contemporary art.
The Hong Kong-born founder of the Sunpride Foundation began his career in real estate development before turning, in the late 1980s, to art collecting. What started with traditional Chinese painting eventually shifted toward contemporary work, and by 2014 Sun had formalized that interest into a foundation focused on queer Asian art and support for LGBTQ+ communities.
Sun has described the foundation as an extension of his life’s work rather than a separate philanthropic gesture. Its collecting strategy is unusually pragmatic. Works are selected not only for their individual merit, but for how they might function in a future museum exhibition devoted to queer art. That exhibition-first approach, he said, was shaped in part by early advice from Dr. Uli Sigg.
The foundation’s most visible expression is the Spectrosynthesis series, which has unfolded across Asia in collaboration with major institutions. The title combines “spectrum” and “photosynthesis,” a pairing Sun uses to describe diversity as a source of energy and renewal. The first installment, Spectrosynthesis I, opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, in 2017 and was the first major LGBTQ+-themed exhibition held at a government-run museum in Asia. Spectrosynthesis II followed at Bangkok Art and Culture Centre with 59 artists from 15 countries and territories, while Spectrosynthesis III at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong explored queer mythologies and historical invisibility.
The newest chapter, Spectrosynthesis Seoul, is on view at Art Sonje Center through June 28, 2026. Co-curated by Sunjung Kim and Yongwoo Lee, the exhibition brings together 74 artists and collectives, nearly 50 of them from Korea. Among the works highlighted are pieces by Kang Seung Lee, Sin Wai Kin, and Inhwan Oh, underscoring the series’ range across generations, geographies, and forms of queer expression.
For Sun, the project is not only about representation in the present. It is also about building the institutional conditions for that representation to endure — in museums, in collections, and in the public imagination.
