"The Lover" is an artistic project aimed at China's conversion therapy targeting the LGBTQ+ community, co-initiated by artist Wu Laobai and LGBTQ+ activist Lin He. Inspired by the film "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri," they used a creative way of communication to amplify the voices that have been silenced.
They collaborated with multiple Chinese LGBTQ+ rights organizations, psychotherapists, and relevant professionals to distill three statements based on the Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders Third Edition (CCMD-3) and statements from health organizations:
"Treat an illness that doesn't exist"
"The Chinese Classification of Mental Disorders still includes sexual orientation disorders"
"19 years, why?"
These three statements were printed on three red trucks and traveled through six cities, visiting nine organizations confirmed to be conducting conversion therapy.
Rainbow Path
The project planner launched a crowdfunding campaign on November 29, 2018. By June 30, 2019, a total of 810 people had participated in the donation, raising a total of 42,269.6 yuan and forming a rainbow path of about 2,113.45 kilometers in length.
#Corrected People#
On June 30, 2019, three trucks arrived in Beijing. The "three sentences" were given to the public, and people rewrote them and made their own graphics based on their real experiences, turning the three red trucks into shared billboards.
To this end, the project planner created the tag #Corrected People# on Weibo, and collected 98 sets of photos, that is, "three sentences" for 98 different cases.
