“VIRTUALLY ASIAN“
Astria Suparak
Single-channel video with sound (English narration; available with English or Chinese subtitles), 3:05 minutes
2021
Commissioned by the Berkeley Art Center
https://bit.ly/VirtuallyAsian
*This video broke the Walker Art Center’s record for online views of the Collection Playlist program*
- Description
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- Exhibitions & Screenings
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- From the series Asian futures, without Asians
Virtually Asian is a 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.
Gleaning examples from major sci-fi productions spanning four decades, the video reveals this trope as a poor attempt to mask white supremacist imagination and casting. This well-trodden shortcut is meant to create the appearance of a diverse world without hiring non-white people in any significant capacity (in front of or behind the camera).
Soundtracked by Vietnamese French beatmaker Onra, who deftly blends traditional and pop Chinese music from the 1960s with hip-hop, Virtually Asian is a video by Thai American artist Astria Suparak.
Virtually Asian is part of Suparak's ongoing research project, Asian futures, without Asians, which is a taxonomy of how white mainstream filmmakers depict future worlds that are Asian-inflected, while simultaneously sidelining or disappearing the progenitors of those diverse Asian cultures. The project, which draws from the histories of art, architecture, design, fashion, film, food, and weaponry, will be unveiled beginning in 2021 in various forms, including gallery installations, collages, videos, visual essays, and a multimedia presentation presented by contemporary art museums, science centers, a science-fiction festival, film festivals and journals, and other organizations.
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WATCH VIDEO
View English subtitled version here.
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EXHIBITIONS
The Option To…
Organized by Daniel Nevers
Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, California
October 2020—February 2021 (online)
Artists: Kimberley Acebo Arteche, Adia Millett, Roya Ebtahaj, Feral Fabric, Dionne Lee, Astria Suparak
Berkeley Art Center presents a series of newly commissioned projects by artists working in video, animation, writing, textiles, photography, and interactive media. As part of its response to the pandemic, and inspired by the Feminist Art Coalition’s call to draw attention to works informed by various feminisms, Berkeley Art Center will unveil these projects every few weeks during the exhibition run.
Encoding Futures: Critical Imaginaries of AI
Curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan
Oxy Arts, Los Angeles
September 16—November 19, 2021
Artists: Algorithmic Justice League, Stephanie Dinkins, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Maya Ganesh, Kite, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Niama Safia Sandy, Caroline Sinders, Astria Suparak, Mandy Harris William
Algorithmic worldmaking often unfolds in a “black box”: an opaque space of automated decision-making whose rationale is hidden from public view. Researchers and cultural workers are opening up the black box for scrutiny to imagine possibilities for feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI. This exhibition assembles the work of artists who visualize the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries, and envision speculative futures engineered for just outcomes.
Suparak’s “Virtually Asian” will be exhibited as part of “Sympathetic White Robots (and Cyborgs),” a new installation commissioned for this exhibition.
Collection Playlists: Virtually Asian & Beirut Outtakes
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (on-site and online)
February 8–22, 2022
*Broke the Walker’s record for online views of the Collection Playlist program, with close to 700 views in 2 weeks (does not include in-person views)*
Peggy Ahwesh and Astria Suparak offer inventive perspectives of Western influences on Asian cinema and Asian influences on Western cinema. In Ahwesh’s Beirut Outtakes (2007), found footage retrieved from an abandoned cinema in Beirut provides commentary on cultural appropriation in the Middle East. In Suparak’s recent video essay Virtually Asian (2021), holographic advertisement scenarios reveal a white supremacist history of Hollywood science fiction filmmaking.
Grow Our Souls
Organized by Melissa Wang
SOMArts, San Francisco
April 30—May 22, 2022
Artists: Astria Suparak, Cindy Shih, Connie Zheng, Diana Li, Jess X Snow, Kacy Jung, Monica Tie, Nancy Sayavong, Preetika Rajgariah, Rea Lynn de Guzman, Sheng Lor, Trinh Mai
Inspired by Grace Lee Boggs, Grow Our Souls showcases twelve artists who are reimagining labor in an era of climate change and late-stage capitalism.
Excelsior
Sept. 6, 2022, 7pm EST: The Armory Show VIP event @ Quad Cinema, 34 W. 13th St, New York, NY — free and open to the public through registration
Sept. 7—20, 2022 @ online on Art At A Time Like This and NOWNESS
Short films and videos curated by Job Piston, featuring artists in visual and live arts who paint a multinational landscape inhabited by fictional, or at times dystopic, heroines: Astria Suparak, Kang Seung Lee, Lu Yang, Bobby Yu Shuk Pui, Christa Joo Hyun D’Angelo, FAMEME, Prumsodun Ok, Ming Wong Yu, Yu Cheng-Ta. Followed by a gathering in the Quad’s in-house bar. Excelsior is named after the starship led by Captain Sulu of Star Trek and meaning ‘onward and upwards’.
see me don’t see me
Nov. 4-6, 2022 @ A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, online
Film program organized by artist Maya Jeffereis, featuring work by Joiri Minaya, Rhea Storr, Astria Suparak, and Jeffereis, who all address the hypervisibility and simultaneous invisibility of bodies of color. “Together, these works invite viewers not only to reflect on misrepresentations of the past and their many transmutations in the present, but to imagine a future that doesn’t replicate the past.”
What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI
Curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan
Sept. 7—Dec. 9, 2023 @ Ford Foundation Gallery, New York, NY
The exhibition assembles the work of artists who map the limits of our current algorithmic imaginaries and move beyond them in acts of critical world building. Algorithmic worldmaking often unfolds in a “black box”––an opaque space of automated decision-making whose rationale is hidden from public view. The featured artists open up the black box for scrutiny, imagining possibilities for feminist, antiracist, and decolonial AI.
Suparak’s “Virtually Asian” will be exhibited as part of the installation “White Robot Tears” commissioned for this exhibition.
New Eden: Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed
ArtScience Museum, Marina Bay Sands, Singapore
Oct. 21, 2023–March 3, 2024
This exhibition offers fresh insights on science fiction, a genre built on envisioning alternative futures and imaginary realms. Adopting Western science fiction paradigms, such as parallel worlds and interdimensional travel, as a starting point, New Eden explores science fiction’s possible roots in Asian philosophy and spirituality.
Suparak’s “Virtually Asian” will be exhibited as part of the installation “White Robot Tears V2” commissioned for this exhibition.
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PRESS & WRITINGS
NEW YORK TIMES, “Pushing Against Hate: Asian-American artists are spurred to activism,” Aruna D’Souza, April 18, 2021
“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.'”
KQED, “Astria Suparak’s ‘Virtually Asian’ Analyzes Sci-Fi to Argue for Less Racist Futures,” Theadora Walsh, March 2, 2021
“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.”
ART AND KNOWLEDGE AFTER 1900, “Ethnic futurisms and contemporary art,” Alice Ming Wai Jim, edited by James Fox & Vid Simoniti (Manchester University Press, 2023)
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.
LOS ANGELES TIMES, “Essential Arts,” Carolina A. Miranda, May 1, 2021
“on my watch list is Astria Suparak’s ‘Virtually Asian’ […] well worth checking out.”
THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER, “How Sci-Fi Films Use Asian Characters to Telegraph the Future While Also Dehumanizing Them,” Evan Nicole Brown, Nov. 16, 2021
“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.”
MEDIA-N JOURNAL OF THE NEW MEDIA CAUCUS, “High-Tech Orientalism and Science Fiction Futures in Astria Suparak’s ‘Virtually Asian’ (2021),” Kaitlin Forcier, Feb. 1, 2022
“The mute virtual women of the films profiled in Virtually Asian represent a curtailing of the technologically-enhanced female body. The effect of the accumulation of echoing tropes in Virtually Asian – of repeated images of Asian women in traditional dress appearing as immaterial set dressing for white characters – is to emphasize how relentless this process of erasure is. […]
Virtually Asian, released in spring 2021 against the backdrop of the pandemic, is indeed timely. As racialized violence against Asian Americans spiked this year, this film turns a critical lens on just how pervasive anti-Asian depictions are in popular culture. […] While many have spent the past year and a half watching movies at home, absorbing the types of media depictions that Suparak analyzes, the pandemic has also offered an opportunity for reflection. Despite its sharp critique, Virtually Asian ultimately strikes a hopeful tone. Science fiction films, after all, offer collective visions of the future: we have the capacity to imagine futures that are less racist, less sexist, more accurate reflections of the world we hope to inhabit.”
NEXTSHARK, “‘Outsize, empty, mute Asians’: ‘Virtually Asian’ video essay critiques portrayals of Asians in popular sci-fi“, Sarah Yukiko, Nov. 22, 2021
Reprinted in YAHOO NEWS
ForYourArt, “Top Pick of the Day,” Sept. 16, 2021
Hyperallergic, “Your Concise Los Angeles Art Guide for October 2021,” Matt Stromberg and Elisa Wouk Almino, Oct. 2021
“Your list of must-see, fun, insightful, and very Los Angeles art events this month. […] Artists uncover the biases of AI […]”
CONGRATULATIONS PINE TREE (the San Francisco Bay Area’s arts and culture podcast), Feb. 9, 2021
“This is the toast of the town! Astria Suparak has a new video essay called ‘Virtually Asian’ [….] that has been put out by the Berkeley Art Center. […] It is a video essay which 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 — oh weird! — while the main cast is devoid of actual Asian people. And we heard a lot about the making of this project, and it is very incisive. Interesting project, everyone should watch that. Maybe you should organize a viewing parting with your friends, Listeners. A little get-together. A virtual viewing party.”
BOING BOING, “Watch a supercut of sci-fi movies that use Asian bodies without casting Asian characters,” Janelle Hessig, March 7, 2021
“Particularly prevalent are the Asian hologram advertisements that apparently occupy every cityscape in the future, from Blade Runner (1982) to A.I. (2001) to Minority Report (2002), and do we even need to start in on Ghost in the Shell (2017)?”
THE BROOKLYN RAIL, “Crisis, A Critical Imaginary,” Charlotte Kent, Nov. 2023
“A current show at the Ford Foundation, curated by Mashinka Firunts Hakopian and Meldia Yesayan, What Models Make Worlds: Critical Imaginaries of AI (on view through December 9, 2023), aims to disrupt general impressions about the machine learning algorithms of technology. […] The fourteen artists (individual or collectives) in the show tackle the world making of AI systems.
The crisis of AI is most obvious in the technology’s ongoing bias concerning Black and brown people, a fundamental problem in continuing use of these major data sets; as one example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics finds 70 percent of fast food workers to be white but Stable Diffusion’s model represents fast food workers 70 percent of the time as Black or brown. Voicing Erasure (2020), a three minute video by Algorithmic Justice League, as well as works by Stephanie Dinkins, the recipient of the first LG Guggenheim Award earlier this year, or Astria Suparak’s Virtually Asian (2021) engage the stereotypes that seep into data sets. Researchers have for years critiqued the “dubious curation” and continue to emphasize the need for solidarity and ethical AI standards within these trillion parameter machine learning models; when people talk about the decreasing costs of training AI models as enabling greater accessibility, that depends on continued use of these problematic foundational sets like LAION. Scholars from leading research institutions proposed “The Foundation Model Transparency Index (FMTI)” necessitating greater transparency if AI companies are to be held accountable. […]
What Models Make Worlds is an important exhibition for audiences to view and engage with the social and economic issues that are pressing our representatives to make decisions; if we aren’t informed about these AI systems then how are we to voice our concerns and demands within this representative democracy?”
SF/Arts, “Highlights: Films: Astria Suparak’s Virtually Asian,” February 2021
RELATED WORKS
- Asian futures, without Asians performance lecture
- White Robot Tears and Sympathetic White Robots installations
- On the Neon Horizon video
- Check out the Asian futures, without Asians series and the posts tagged #scifi
Astria Suparak 