Jordan Wept

A video spotlighting the range and utility of the long-running Crying Jordan meme, which re-immortalizes one of the 20th century’s most successful athletes into an avatar of failure; an Everyman for disappointment, angst, and sorrow; a tool for rapid responses to live events; and a demonstration of the increased power of (anonymous, decentralized) fan culture.

Walker Magazine: “No Time for Winners”

“The sports film genre—as it has come to be defined through its codes, scholarship, production and screening contexts, and broadcast platforms—is dominated by two typologies: fictive sports films, which often reinforce dominant attitudes and social and cultural stereotypes while distorting or whitewashing history for storytelling purposes; and commercial documentaries, which typically focus on exceptional players, coaches, or teams.”

Tropical Cats

“A sly, sun-soaked detour into cat video territory, refracted through postcolonial critique and pop collage. This winking essay film uses the feline internet genre to unpack tropical aesthetics, exoticism, and identity politics, purring with layered audio, meme logic, and cultural dissection. As playful as it is pointed.”—Chicago Underground Film Festival

V MAGAZINE: Astria Suparak

“This issue of V ART records Thai-American artist Astria Suparak’s long-term research project ‘Asian futures, without Asians.’ She uses precise language like a scalpel cutting through the ‘human beings’ that Hollywood science fiction films and television are keen to depict.”

Finite Horizon

An amalgamated skyline of Asian futures imagined by white filmmakers. Sourced from sci-fi movies and television shows that depict a vice-ridden, dangerous world overtly marked with elements of East, Southeast, and South Asian architecture.

ON THE NEON HORIZON

A short video essay that takes one of the world-building tics of white science fiction — gratuitous signage in Asian languages — to consider its utopian potential and dystopian applications.

The Hollywood Reporter on Asian Futures, Without Asians

“Asian Futures, Without Asians illuminates the lopsided nature of one Hollywood genre and critiques the way media is concepted to guide audience empathy. Suparak’s [installation] investigates how artificial intelligence is coded in film, and the ways in which sympathetic robots and cyborgs, who are often white, are designed”

HELMET TO HELMET

Collage of the Philippine salakót (roughly translates from Tagalog to “native helmet”); how it was worn by Filipinos and Spaniards in the occupying Spanish army; then adapted into the pith helmet, since deployed by every white colonial power.

New York Times on Virtually Asian

“Countering invisibility is at the heart of a short film by Astria Suparak titled ‘Virtually Asian.’ It splices together scenes from science fiction movies in which urban landscapes are filled with stereotypical ‘Asian’ signifiers, but the actual characters are almost exclusively white.”

KQED review of Virtually Asian

“Suparak’s piece is immediate and her voice, narrating the words, is melodic and compelling. The over-dubbing of her acerbic observations on blockbuster films is a compelling prelude to other iterations of her work that will appear in fragments across digital platforms.”

VIRTUALLY ASIAN

Short video essay that looks at how white science fiction filmmakers fill the backgrounds of their futuristic worlds with hollow Asian figures—in the form of video and holographic advertisements—while the main cast (if not the entirety of their fictional universe’s population) is devoid of actual Asian people.

QUEER THREADS

“Queer Threads is not just an exploration of fiber art and crafts, but also a celebration of the creativity, diversity, and vibrancy of contemporary queer culture.”

WOMEN INC. LEXICON

A lexicon of neologisms coining new words for a new age, one marked by advances in omnipresent technology and mass surveillance; a privatization of art, culture, and education; as well as a continued struggle with intersectional issues.

DIE D.E.I.

A virtual haunted house of the horrors of D.E.I. in cultural institutions where we examine some of the horrific and harmful practices, while making a case for better ways to approach this necessary work.