The Wishing Fountain is a queer Asian diasporic publishing, archive and public cultural platform. We collect, purchase, commission, translate and circulate queer publications, zines, artist books, personal narratives and community texts from East Asian, Southeast Asian and Sinophone diasporic contexts. Through pop-up reading rooms, workshops, exhibitions, public programmes and online archives, we make space for voices that are often left out of mainstream libraries, art institutions and national narratives.

We see publishing not only as a form of printed matter, but also as a temporary home, a low-cost yet resilient cultural infrastructure, and a way for dispersed communities to find one another. For many queer Asian diasporic people, experiences of language, migration, race, gender and intimacy cannot be easily held by a single identity or fixed location. The Wishing Fountain works within these gaps, creating spaces for reading, gathering, listening, exchange and return.

Our work includes building a queer Asian/ESEA/Sinophone diasporic publishing collection, supporting the circulation of independent publications by artists and small presses, and organising pop-up reading rooms, zine workshops, creative writing sessions, artist talks and community archive projects. We collaborate with artists, bookshops, libraries, researchers, queer community groups and cultural organisations to explore publishing as a practice of memory-keeping, relation-building, desire-making and resistance against erasure.

The name The Wishing Fountain comes from a simple image: people cast their wishes into water, and the water holds them, echoes them, carries them elsewhere, until one day they return to the community in another form. We hope this platform can do the same. Rather than defining queer Asian experience on anyone's behalf, we offer a place where these experiences can be collected, touched, shared and written onward.