In 2019, we produced Yellow Peril: Queer Destiny – an experimental documentary film that follows the story of Vancouver-based drag artist, Maiden China (Kendell Yan), and her explorations of racial, cultural, diasporic, sexual, and gender identity. In the development of this film, we wanted to experiment with imagery that reflected the spiritual, metaphysical, cosmic, interpersonal, relational experiences of our queer and cultural identities. As a filmmaking methodology, we employed the metaphor of the “Five Elements” in Chinese culture to explore the discursive formation of queer Chinese diasporic identity. The “Five Elements” also have many different applications to understanding life, identity, relationships, health (relationships between organs); they’re also known as the Five Phases, the Five Agents, the Five Movements, Five Processes, the Five Steps/Stages and the Five Planets; each element is related to a sensory organ, to taste, and to smell. The elements also have numerous approaches to understanding ways of “being”; they also have principles of metaphysics, and temporalities. We invoked these five elements through the cinematography, as a conduit to understanding queer East Asian cultural formations, as not an intellectual delineation, but a way to investigate the embodiment of queer Chinese, diasporic identity.