“ASIAN FUTURES” series

Astria Suparak
2020—Ongoing
http://bit.ly/asianfutureswithoutasians

• DESCRIPTION
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• PROJECTS and Exhibitions, Screenings, Presentations
  1. VIDEO (FILM ESSAY): Virtually Asian
  2. MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE: Asian futures, without Asians
  3. INSTALLATION: Finite Horizon
  4. VIDEO (FILM ESSAY): On the Neon Horizon
  5. INSTALLATION: White Robot Tears
  6. VIDEO (LOOPING): Tropicollage
  7. INSTALLATION: Aloha, Boys
  8. INSTALLATION: Sympathetic White Robots (and Cyborgs)
  9. VISUAL ESSAY: Seedy Space Ports and Colony Planets: Asian Conical Hats in Cinematic Dystopias
  10. COLLAGE: Helmet to Helmet
  11. POSTER SERIES & BACKDROPS: Ancient Sci-Fi
  12. MURAL: Tang Rainbow
  13. VISUAL ESSAY: Asian futures, without Asians
  14. VIDEO INSTALLATION: For Ornamental Purposes
  15. More
      .
• PRESS & QUOTES
  1. NEW YORK TIMES
  2. 4COLUMNS
  3. KQED
  4. THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER
  5. X-TRA
  6. IMAGINARY WORLDS PODCAST
  7. VARIABLE WEST
  8. SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST
  9. More

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DESCRIPTION

A samurai sword on the wall of an evil mastermind’s office. A home decorated with Buddha statues. A blonde woman in a cheongsam. A speculative cityscape punctuated with Arabic signage. What does it mean when so many white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of actual Asian people?

Asian Futures is a visual analysis of half a century of science fiction cinema. Astria Suparak built a taxonomy of the objects and tropes conscripted for the ubiquitous stories of Asian futures envisioned by white filmmakers. A multipart research project, Suparak draws from the histories of art, architecture, design, fashion, film, food, religion, and weaponry to elucidate connections between the present and the past, to demonstrate the insidiousness of racist tropes, and to reveal how deeply ingrained they are in our visual culture.

The projects in Asian Futures include gallery installations, single- and multi-channel videos, multimedia performances, collages, murals, prints, and visual essays, which have been presented by contemporary art institutions, science museums, universities, a science-fiction festival, an experimental film festival, art and film journals, and other organizations.

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PROJECTS

1. VIDEO (FILM ESSAY): Virtually Asian

2. MULTIMEDIA PERFORMANCE: Asian futures, without Asians

EXCERPT IN PROGRESS:
Jan. 19, 2021: Asian As A Costume (excerpt of AFWA) @ Living Room Light Exchange artist salon (LRLX), San Francisco, online

6. VIDEO (LOOPING DIGITAL PROJECT): Tropicollage

July 2021 @ Other Futures, Amsterdam

April 30—May 22, 2022 @ Grow Our Souls, SOMArts, San Francisco

May 6, 2022 @ touch me don’t touch me, Prismatic Ground, Maysles Documentary Center, New York + online

Feb. 23, 2023 @ NightLife of Tomorrow, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

Oct. 21, 2023 @ Contemporary Views from the Bay Area, part of Bay Area Now 9, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco

Nov 21, 2023—Feb 18, 2024 @ New Tropics, Appetite, Singapore

9. VISUAL ESSAY: Seedy Space Ports and Colony Planets: Asian Conical Hats in Cinematic Dystopias
10. COLLAGE: Helmet to Helmet

July 2021 @ Seen journal, Philadelphia

11. POSTER SERIES: Ancient Sci-Fi

May 2023 @ X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, Los Angeles

12. MURAL: Tang Rainbow

April 30—May 22, 2022 @ Grow Our Souls, SOMArts, San Francisco

13. VISUAL ESSAY: Asian futures, without Asians

June 2021 @ Why are they so afraid of the lotus?, San Francisco + Berlin

14. VIDEO INSTALLATION: For Ornamental Purposes

April 13—June 5, 2022 @ with her voice, penetrate earth’s floor, Eli Klein Gallery, New York

Feb. 23, 2023 @ NightLife of Tomorrow, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

15. INSTAGRAM ALBUM: The Urban Legend of Rat Eating

Feb. 2021 @ The Royal Society of Canada, Edmonton, Alberta, online

RELATED

ARTIST RESIDENCY
May—Dec. 2021 @ The Zay Collection, London, England + Dubai, UAE
Astria Suparak will conduct research on the ways in which American science fiction films represent Arab fashion — particularly its overlap with West Asian and South Asian cultures.

See all related posts under the “scifi” tag.

For the latest updates, follow on social media.

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PRESS & QUOTES

NEW YORK TIMES, “Pushing Against Hate: Asian-American artists are spurred to activism,” Aruna D’Souza, April 18, 2021

Excerpt:
“One of the key strategies for today’s artist-activists is creating visibility: calling attention to the often unseen and unnoted presence of Asian-American communities in cities and in the culture — to their labor and contributions, and to the violence aimed at them.

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. She worked on it during the coronavirus lockdown.

‘The piece is part of a larger project examining 40 years of sci-fi films,’ Suparak said, ‘and how white filmmakers envision a future that is inflected by Asian culture but devoid of actual Asian people.’

The project emerged, Suparak said, ‘out of an ongoing erasure and racism and violence, and how both in real life and in mainstream media our varied and unique cultures are carelessly misidentified and jumbled together.'”

4COLUMNS, “Dune,” Ed Halter, Oct. 22, 2021

Excerpt:
“[Frank] Herbert’s original text [Dune], inspired partly by T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom, derives its motifs from Islamic culture to construct the fictional Fremen and their beliefs, and the film offers lots of well-composed images of unabashed Orientalism to make sure these parallels stick: light streaming through geometric grilles, fortresses rising like ziggurats, long lines of dusty, robe-swathed masses, fragments of swirling calligraphic script. Many of these were already cited as common elements of contemporary science-fiction films in Astria Suparak’s illustrated lecture “Asian Futures Without Asians,” which she’s been presenting since early 2021. Suparak demonstrates, through copious examples, how persistently—and incoherently—Western science-fiction films borrow from superficial aspects of Asian culture, via costuming, architecture, and set design, in order to impart what is imagined to be a sense of the exotic and futuristic.

It’s hard not to think about her thesis while watching Dune. Even if its Islamic borrowings might be expected owing to the source material, all kinds of unrelated Asian cultural artifacts are randomly strewn about this Duniverse—bindis, chimes, mandalas, parasols, silken robes, even Mongolian throat singing—intermingled with a cold European medievalism to round out its project of conveying the fantastical through a bewildering collage of familiar tropes. At times these cultural mash-ups are deliriously wacky: there’s a powerfully somber sort of camp at play when Villeneuve throws in a martial bagpiper to lead a procession of the House of Atreides, men in macho metal armor and women delicately jeweled and veiled, as they debark upon their arid satrapy.”

ARTREVIEW, “What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI,” Cassie Packard, Nov. 2023

Cultural imaginaries around AI are of course not only gendered but also racialised, a thread that Astria Suparak pulls with Sympathetic White Robots (White Robot Tears version) (2021/2023). The vinyl print collage features scenes of emotionally distraught AI – all of whom are white-coded – from popular sci-fi flicks like Blade Runner (1982) and Ghost in the Shell (2017). This wry yet weighty piece is part of Suparak’s research project Asian futures, without Asians (2020 – ongoing), which lays bare American sci-fi’s disturbing fixation with superficially Orientalist futures populated by white protagonists. Within that white supremacist cinemascape, these robots’ proximity to whiteness can be seen as making them sympathetic subjects: a shameful testament to the extent to which technological futures must be reimagined, particularly in the West.”

KQED, “Sci-Fi is Full of ‘Asian Futures, Without Asians’,” THE DO LIST, Sarah Hotchkiss, March 2020

“Once it’s pointed out, it’s hard to unsee: Asian futures without Asian people. In 2019, Oakland curator and artist Astria Suparak started cataloguing the trope (a form of techno-orientalism) in science fiction films made by white directors. […]

The talk ‘Asian Futures, Without Asians’ is Suparak’s critical distance. Examining the imagery in movies like Luc Besson’s ‘The Fifth Element,’ with examples that stretch from the 1970s to present-day sci-fi, she asks the audience a crucial question: What does it mean to absorb visions of the future that decontextualize Asian culture from its very people?“

KQED, “Astria Suparak’s ‘Virtually Asian’ Analyzes Sci-Fi to Argue for Less Racist Futures,” Theadora Walsh, March 2, 2021

Excerpts:
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. […]

Racist histories feed right into an inability to imagine less racist futures. It is here that Suparak’s work intervenes, insisting on creative depictions of a future in which white American myths no longer dominate the collective imaginary. […]

Virtually Asian is just one shard of a larger research project that examines over 40 years of American science fiction cinema and television from a critical lens. The presentations of her results are diffuse: the video at Berkeley Art Center, a forthcoming ontological essay on the conical hat, troughs of materials culled from fan sites and military wikis, illustrated essays, screenshots from Bladerunner and Ghost in the Shell and a possible series of GIFs. […]
The less utilitarian approach to composing digital worlds, modeled by the Berkeley Art Center’s hands-off curation and suggested by the arguments in Suparak’s work, feels like a possible escape from the algorithms. Instead of a high-tech future designed to tell white American stories, instead of a pressing cohesion that insists on one national mythology, The Option To… and Virtually Asian make an argument for complex, non-rigid and diverse sequences of media that cohabitate in the present moment.

THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, “How Sci-Fi Films Use Asian Characters to Telegraph the Future While Also Dehumanizing Them,” Evan Nicole Brown, Nov. 16, 2021

Excerpt:
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 as “who the audience is supposed to root for,” Suparak says, adding: “The way they’re presented is in stark contrast to how Asian robots are often dehumanized.”

Encoding Futures — which examines how artificial intelligence molds society, and how algorithms have the power to define the world to come — was co-organized by Oxy Arts with Mashinka Firunts Hakopian, Mellon professor of the practice at Occidental, and Meldia Yesayan, director of Oxy Arts. It takes a multidisciplinary approach to looking at representation, both in terms of how the future is presented and who gets to exist there.

Says Hakopian of selecting Suparak’s work for the show, “Part of the reason why it was so crucial to include this work is because it is a really remarkable media archaeology that’s looking at how Hollywood cinema has shaped popular imaginaries of AI. And so, Hollywood has played an outsized role in determining what AI looks like, sounds like, feels like within the popular imaginary. And I think Astria’s piece does an incredible job of bringing that to the fore.”

ART AND KNOWLEDGE AFTER 1900, “Ethnic futurisms and contemporary art,” Alice Ming Wai Jim, edited by James Fox & Vid Simoniti (Manchester University Press, 2023)

“This paradoxical relationship between the dominance of high-tech Orientalist stereotypes and the relative invisibility of flesh-and-blood Asians in both cinematic future imaginaries and productions is the subject of Thai American curator and artist Astria Suparak’s first video, Virtually Asian (2021). Only three minutes long, the work is a tour de force in explaining how the science-fiction film industry – from Blade Runner to Paramount’s live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell – populates futuristic worlds in its films with Asian bodies but without casting actual Asian people. One sequence scrutinises the presence of Japanese women in Ghost in the Shell mainly as holographic geishas. […]

Part of the larger multimedia project Asian futures, without Asians (2020–ongoing), Suparak’s supercut video essay of forty years of sci-fi film history undertakes a media archaeology on cyberpunk’s fetishistic urban ethnopornography. By interrogating accounts of the future imagined by others, Asian futures, without Asians excavates racist tropes and cultural clichés pre-existing in the symbolic systems within which mainstream science fiction operates.”

X-TRA CONTEMPORARY ART JOURNAL, “Softness Is a Power: Astria Suparak in Conversation with Dorothy R. Santos,” Dorothy R. Santos, Spring 2023 issue

Excerpt:
“Your work forces the viewer to question how much an object resembles the country from which it allegedly originates. How much of the object you are examining resembles or is connected to the place it ought to represent? In another sense, the other side of an object’s mediation rests with the viewer and their willingness to either accept or question the way an object is mediated. Herein lies the responsibility of the filmmaker and artist!

I’ve always understood your work and scholarship as a way of encouraging individuals to put in the work to understand the way that something is created, designed, and then wielded as a part of the visual language and how those signifiers start to seep into both individual and collective consciousness and imagination.”

IMAGINARY WORLDS PODCAST, Episode 193: “Asian Futures Without Asians,” Eric Molinsky, March 3, 2022

Excerpt:
“Part of what makes up a genre, like science fiction or fantasy, is that certain tropes are repeated. And as a fan, it’s fun to recognize tropes when they come up and appreciate how they’ve been adapted. But I recently learned about a genre within a genre that’s been hiding in plain sight – or at least it was for me.

I was invited to watch a presentation called Asian futures, without Asians by the artist Astria Suparak. Her talk looks at how science fiction often depicts a future full of Asian iconography that’s mixed-up and taken out of context. But there aren’t many Asian people in these futures. This is a talk she’s given in person and virtually. And her presentation has been paired with exhibits at museums and galleries.

I expected her to cover obviously offensive things like Flash Gordon serials from the 1930s and Ming the Merciless. And that’s there, but she wanted to concentrate on more recent history. It was an eye-opener for me because I had seen most of the movies and shows she referenced, but I was suddenly seeing them in a whole new light. Apparently, a lot of people feel that way after seeing her presentation.”

V MAGAZINE CHINA, “Astria Suparak: The Asian future in Hollywood science fiction films,” Sept. 2023

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. The utopian illusion of a “community of shared future” points directly to the hidden ills in it — the superficial yearning and deep fear for foreign Asia.

VARIABLE WEST, “Asian Futures, With Asians: Astria Suparak and Everything Everywhere All at Once,” May Maylisa Cat, May 17, 2022

Excerpt:
What I like about Asian Futures, Without Asians is that it didn’t miss: it was meticulously curated and combed over—every name, pronunciation, artifact, fabric, statue, pattern, and possible speculation. White filmmakers, you designated all this racist stuff out there in the universe—about us, about our sisters and brothers—and Suparak isn’t here to tiptoe around it for your comfort. […]

It was as if Everything Everywhere took all the things that make sci-fi films insufferable and racist for Asian people, and banished them to another universe. Asian Futures, Without Asians showed us a map of where they were embedded, awaiting their destruction. In their own way, both are defiant, which made it cathartic, brilliant.”

THE MICHIGAN DAILY, “Astria Suparak’s ‘Asian futures, without Asians’ exposed Orientalism in sci-fi, and that’s needed,” Saarthak Johri, Kristen Su and Thejas Varma, Dec. 3, 2023

“The on-screen display of movie stills, accompanied by dim lighting and witty commentary, set the tone for a compelling yet brutally honest exploration. In a setting like the one Suparak sublimated, every little gesture incorporated into the presentation became performance art. Each topic transition was marked by sci-fi-esque synth motifs and a spoiler warning, and every purposeful hand movement cut through the air with the grace of a trained dancer. […]

Suparak’s extensive attention to subtle thematic elements and the placement of background objects allowed her to display the nuances of appropriation. […]

This practice, a complete media cleanse, clearly made it easier to analyze the faults in all these sci-fi classics, which Suparak does so brilliantly and viscerally in her work. That same attitude toward analysis should be more commonly held.”

SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST, “Why is being an Asian-American woman in the US still a danger? Art exhibition in tribute to Christina Yuna Lee seeks answers,” Danielle Wu, April 18, 2022

Excerpt:
“It is not a yearning for representation, but rather the heavy burden that some bodies carry to represent nations oceans away, that the exhibition aims to confront. […] Astria Suparak’s For Ornamental Purposes (2022), a three-channel video, used scenes from films that cast Asian women only to be desired and conquered, pointing to the harm made possible by fantasy.

‘With Her Voice, Penetrate Earth’s Floor’ carves quiet moments like these to express how it feels to be broken.”

THE MARY SUE, “These Early 2000s Video Games Really Loved Orientalism. Have Games Improved Since?,” Madeline Carpou, Nov. 8, 2022

Excerpt:
“Our Books Editor, Alyssa Shotwell, recently turned my attention towards Astria Suparak, an artist and curator who’s currently got a multimedia exhibition going on called “Asian Futures Without Asians.” It’s a project that analyzes popular pieces of media, most notably Blade Runner, that utilize Asian aesthetics to a gross degree without putting Asians anywhere remotely important in their stories. The buildings are Asian, the crowds are dense, dirty, and Asian, and the sex, drugs, and fashion are Asian to a T. But the protagonists? Dream on, cowboy.

An important thing to note here, which Astria expresses with both humor and anger, is the fact that the precipitators of this kind of cultural orientalism are never Asian themselves. They’re almost like delayed colonists, channeling the spirit of their seafaring ancestors who sailed to the East and thought, “Damn, that’s odd.” Except there’s no real excuse for this kind of stereotyping anymore, since we live in a globalized world, libraries are free, and while traveling is expensive, nothing is stopping you from walking through a city and getting a good, honest look at the people who live there.

The unfortunate thing about video games, though, is the fact that there’s nothing explicitly requiring them to globalize within themselves, even though they’re the perfect platform with which to do so. Combine this with the fact that lots of people still think Asian racism isn’t real, and suddenly, you have rife opportunities to molest a culture that isn’t yours with base humor and overt slobbering.”

KIM NGUYEN, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts curator (Q&A, June 2021)

“Your project really underlines all the ways that power is exercised through representations and through the media. […] You tracking that kind of history over the last 40 years proves how those reproductions [of the same colonial violence] just keep happening.

[…] It ends up being our reduction and erasure, which is in service of expanding the white imaginary, which I think you very eloquently presented in this talk. We, and I use this as an invitational we, are so often being used to uphold the same violent racial hierarchies and I think the very expansiveness of your project really proves that. We don’t arrive at these associations alone, right? They’re reproduced, they’re in the media, they’re in all of these things that are around us that we’re constantly consuming actively and passively. And an Asian future, without Asians is this really economic rendering, like […] you don’t need us there to show that white supremacy exists and that they desire us not to exist at all.”

ED HALTER, critic and a founding director of Light Industry (introduction at Bard, Nov. 2021)

“with this lecture and its related projects Astria is bringing that same energy into a new form of media analysis that is in itself a new form of cross-platform production.”

THE ART REPORT, “This Month’s Feature: Asian Futures, Without Asians,” March 2020

SF/Arts, “Highlights: Films: Astria Suparak’s Virtually Asian,” Feb. 2021

7×7, “28 Fun Things to Do This Week,” Chloe Saraceni, Jun 04, 2021

NOB HILL GAZETTE, “What To Do This Week,” Michelle Konstantinovsky, June 8, 2021

Press on Virtually Asian here.
For press on specific projects, please visit their individual pages

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