“ASIAN FUTURES, WITHOUT ASIANS”

Astria Suparak
Multimedia performance, 60 minutes
2021–ongoing — Currently touring
Originally commissioned by The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco
http://bit.ly/AFWA-presentation

• Description
• In-person Performance — currently touring
• Performances & Exhibitions
• Previews
• Publication
• Press & Quotes
• From the series Asian futures, without Asians

Asian futures, without Asians is a multimedia presentation by artist and curator Astria Suparak, which asks: “What does it mean when so many white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of actual Asian people?”

Part critical analysis, part reflective essay and sprinkled throughout with humor, justified anger, and informative morsels, this illustrated lecture examines 60 years of American science fiction cinema through the lens of Asian appropriation and whitewashing. Using a wide interpretation of “Asian” to reflect current and historical geopolitical trends and self-definitions (inclusive of East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia, Central Asia, North Africa, and the Pacific Islands—the latter two of which are not Asia), this research-creation project takes a close look at how Asian cultures have been mixed and matched, contrasted against, and conflated with each other, often creating a fungible “Asianness” in futuristic sci-fi.

The performance is interspersed with selected images and clips from dozens of futuristic movies and television shows, as Suparak delivers related anecdotes, trivia, maps, and historical documents (including photographs, advertisements, and cultural artifacts) from the histories of art, architecture, design, fashion, film, food, and weaponry. Suparak discusses the implications of not only borrowing heavily from Asian cultures, but decontextualizing and misrepresenting them, while excluding Asian contributors. 

The first iteration of Asian futures, without Asians was commissioned by The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, as part of their Trinh T. Minh-ha season. The project has developed over a series of live performances made for the Zoom camera and for in-person, with script, imagery, and backdrops tailored to each arts institution and country in which it was presented. It’s one part of Suparak’s multipart research series Asian futures which includes videos, installations, collages, essays, publications, and other projects.

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PRESENTATIONS & EXHIBITIONS

June 10, 2021*, 5pm PST
The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA

Aug. 14, 2021, 2-4pm PST
ICA LA, co-presented by GYOPO, Los Angeles, CA

Nov. 8-22, 2021
MoMA, New York

*AFWA had 4x more viewers than MoMA’s average for the series*
New York premiere of Asian futures, without Asians. Suparak is joined in conversation by art historian and curator Xin Wang and Theodore Lau, 12-Month Curatorial Intern, Department of Film. Part of the Modern Mondays Virtual Cinema series.

Nov. 11, 2021, 7:30pm EST
Bard College, Annandale-On-Hudson, NY, projected live in the Avery Theater + online

Followed by a conversation between Suparak and critic and editor Dawn Chan. Produced by Bard Film & Electronic Arts in collaboration with the Center for Curatorial Studies, Asian Studies, and Experimental Humanities at Bard.

Nov. 18, 2021, 2:30pm EST
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA, online

Followed by a conversation between Suparak and KJ Mohr. Presented by Visiting Filmmakers Series and Women and Gender Studies, cosponsored by Film and Video Studies, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, College of Visual and Performing Arts, Women and Gender Studies, University Life. 

Nov. 30, 2021, 6pm PST / 9pm EST
Jacob Lawrence Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, online

Pacific Northwest premiere of Asian futures, without Asians. Followed by a conversation between Suparak and Chandan Reddy, author, “Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State” and Associate Professor in the departments of the Comparative History of Ideas and the Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. 

Feb. 15, 2022, 7-9pm GMT
Spike Island, Bristol, UK, online

March 31, 2022, 5pm PST
Reed College, Portland, OR, online

Free and open to the public.

April 2022
Centre A, Vancouver, Canada, on-site and online

April 16, 2022 (Saturday), 6-7:30pm EST
@ The Ohio State University, OH, online

Asian futures, without Asians is the Keynote Address for “On Radical Practice: Representing Politics, Resistance, and Transmission” History of Art Graduate Symposium, organized by the History of Art Graduate Student Association.

Oct. 27, 2022, 6pm EST
@  The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC, online

Hanes Visiting Artist Lecture Series

Nov. 8, 2022
@ Lucasfilm, London, England + San Francisco, CA, online

June 1, 2023, doors 7:30pm, event 8pm
@ 2220 Arts + Archives, Los Angeles, CA, on site

Nov. 15, 2023, 6pm EST
@ University of Michigan Museum of Art, Helmut Stern Auditorium, Ann Arbor, MI, on site

The in-person performance of the latest edition of Asian futures, without Asians. This event is part of the inaugural season of the Digital Studies Institute and the DISCO Network [Digital Inquiry, Speculation, Collaboration, and Optimism Network] series Search Engines: Art, Tech, Justice.

Covid precautions: Attendees requested to wear well-fitting masks and stay home if they are not feeling well. Free masks will be available for those who need them. Space will have air filtration.

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PREVIEWS

• Virtually Asian. This short video essay, commissioned by the Berkeley Art Center, is one of the eight tropes presented in the Asian futures, without Asians presentation (3 minutes).

EXCERPTS FROM DRAFTS & OLDER VERSIONS:

• 2-minute excerpt on Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles’s YouTube channel, 2021 (Chopsticks, 2:26 minutes, poor audio).
• 2-minute excerpt in The Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts’s Library, 2021 (Shōji, 2:14 minutes).
• 4-minute excerpt from Lucasfilm version, 2022 (Kimonos intro, Weapons, 4:12 minutes).
• 6-minute excerpt from the Spike Island & Portland performance, 2022 (Street Vendors, Lanterns). 
• “The Urban Legend of Rat Eating,” is an early sketch of one section of the Asian futures, without Asians presentation, in the form of an Instagram album. It was included in the following exhibitions organized by Ethnocultural Art Histories Research, Concordia University, Montreal, 2021:
  • Engaging Creativities, The Royal Society of Canada, online, February 2021
  • (pre)existing conditions, curated by Tamara Harkness and Sarah Piché, with Alice Ming Wai Jim, Special Projects, ISEA (International Symposium on Electronic Art) 2020, online, October 13 – 19, 2020
  • Hear Us Now!, curated by Diane Wong, Tamara Harkness, Chaeyeon Park, and Sarah Piché, Concordia University, online, June 29 – Sept. 2020
• Hyper(in)visibility: A Panel Discussion with Pearl C. Hsuing, Maia Ruth Lee, Astria Suparak, Christine Tien Wang, and Hồng-Ân Trương, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas. By stephanie mei huang, edited by Alexandra Chang and Alice Ming Wai Jim. Volume 6: Issue 3 (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2021), p. 259-274.

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PUBLICATION

An early, abridged version of “Asian futures, without Asians,” in the form of a visual essay, is included in:

WHY ARE THEY SO AFRAID OF THE LOTUS? (edited by Kim Nguyen and Jeanne Gerrity).

• Print version (black and white, 39-page spread) published by CCA Wattis Institute (San Francisco) and Sternberg Press (Berlin), June 2021. Distributed by MIT Press. 
• Online version (full color, 39-page spread) available for free download from the Wattis Institute Library

A conceptual “course packet” of readings around and inspired by the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha. Driven by the central question “What are we learning from artists today?” the second volume of A Series of Open Questions is informed by themes found in the work of Trinh T. Minh-ha, such as cultural hybridization and fluidity of identity, digital and migratory aesthetics, memory and landscape, decentered realities, feminist approaches to storytelling, meditations on death and myth, post-coloniality and decolonization, and women’s work as related to cultural politics. The contributions to Why are they so afraid of the lotus? embody Trinh’s own weariness around categorization and investigate the ways production can come from and be based in positions of unknowing.

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PRESS & QUOTES

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?“

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

“[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.”

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

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.”

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.

In an in-depth conversation with V, Astria admitted that what she discussed was not just the appropriation of style: “It’s not just Asian objects, fashion, and architecture that are commonly appropriated and misused by white people, but also Asian skills, knowledge, philosophies, and religions. These rich and complex traditions are treated like discrete objects to pick apart and mix with other cultures, regardless of their meanings, histories, and origins.”

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

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.”

KIM NGUYEN, Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts curator (post-presentation 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)

“I’m particularly happy to be introducing Astria’s work tonight, as her fascinating and influential career as a curator, writer, and artist has been one that I’ve admired for many years. Her early work as a young independent film programmer in the early 21st century was very inspirational to myself and many innumerable others at the time, particularly in the way that Astria brought together the worlds of cinephilia, fine art, and popular culture in a combination that I felt that no one else was doing.

Later her show “Alien She,” the traveling group exhibition that she curated and produced in 2013-14, which was around the global impact of Riot Grrrl, to be honest, was simply one of the best curated exhibitions I have ever gone to. Among other things, it really blew up the distinctions between popular culture, DIY culture, art, and activism in a really productive manner.

And now 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.

These are only a few of the major projects that Suparak has been behind. There are many others that can be mentioned, and I highly recommend checking out her well-documented website to learn more about the work she’s done, and the work she is going to do.”

CHANDAN REDDY, author, Freedom With Violence: Race, Sexuality and the U.S. State (post-presentation conversation at Jacob Lawrence Gallery, Nov. 2021):

“This piece for me formally lives as an insurgent intervention into the visual tableau of Hollywood curation. If Hollywood as a mass industry curates the images that we receive as our visual unconscious, you’ve offered us this kind of counter-, curative practice that’s also kind of a cure for Asian Americans — to be able to actually see the repertoire of erasure, through representation. That is the essence of Hollywood cinema in relationship to Asians. I really appreciate that blending, or that blurring, of curation and aesthetic intervention. […]

Your project reveals the function of American cinematic Orientalism in justifying U.S. wars in Asia, in justifying the only use of a nuclear bomb in the history of humankind, in justifying the long history of exploiting Asian immigrant labor without enfranchising Asian cultural subjects, that you talked about in relationship to the Asiatic Barred Zone and early migration. […]

It’s so important that we see the work that you’re doing right now, and particularly the way you contextualize it in relationship to COVID, also in relationship to the Atlanta shooting. Because I think that this is the kind of work that reveals how quickly “Asian” goes from reviled limit of the human to erotic object of desire whose potency as an object of desire is the cause of violence against it. 

What I disliked about some of the language around “anti-Asian hate” in the Atlanta shooting is it actually didn’t acknowledge that it wasn’t hate. It was a kind of gruesome fetishistic desire that drove it. And your work is really showing that these two things can be — as contradictory as they are, to be like, you are the animalistic limit of the human and you are the apex of erotic desire — they seem to actually situate themselves simultaneously in American consciousness. […]

Your piece shows that anti-Asian racism, or American Orientalism — maybe that’s a better way of putting it because it’s not always anti-Asian, it’s liking Asians too much — and the violence that it covers over has oftentimes really been not about extinguishing Asia or Asians in the way that, for example, the American pastoral was about getting rid of Native Americans — extinguishing them, excising them. But it’s really about turning everything that is Asia into a bounded object that can be consumed in some way. And that was so powerful in your work and I’m just so moved by that observation. [..] And you show how long this kind of trope is in the cinematic apparatus.

I want to appreciate how important this work is in this moment. In addition to the sense of the violence that’s happening against Asians and Asian immigrants in the U.S., as well as the ongoing counterinsurgency of U.S. empire, we’re all being interacted and mediated by screens now because of COVID. […] I feel like your work is really this attempt to have us think a little bit about what it means to have intimacy through the screen, and the kind of histories of the screen that precede us and will probably organize us before we have a chance to organize ourselves. As much as I’ve always felt a kind of weirdness about the screen as an intimacy, I feel like something in your work is helping me get a sense, too, that there’s a danger with the screen as an intimate medium, if you will, or as an intimate opportunity. So that “Shoji Screen” section [in your presentation] was very Interesting to me in that way.”

DAWN CHAN, editor and New York Times and Artforum critic (post-presentation conversation at Bard, Nov. 2021)

“Thank you to Astria for such a terrific, thoughtful presentation — so wide-ranging and clearly a labor of love, and just such a sharp and urgent critique. […]  When I was writing about Asian futures in Artforum, I was trying to draw a sort of parallel between the projection of Asian people into futuristic settings by American media, on the one hand, and the sort of erasure of diasporic Asians from the present-day American cultural landscape. And it’s really nice to see Astria making the sort of next level, more nuanced point that it’s often not even the case that Asian people do appear in these futuristic settings, but in fact it’s often Asian culture kind of remixed and essentialized, reduced into kind of incoherent mishmash.”

THE DOUBLE NEGATIVE, “Culture Diary” (Asian futures, without Asians selected as the Tuesday pick for what to do in the U.K.), Feb. 14, 2022

“’What does it mean when so many white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of actual Asian people?’ This is the question/departure point for Spike Island’s UK premiere of artist and curator Astria Suparak’s lecture, which grapples with what they describe as ‘a fungible “Asianness” in futuristic sci-fi’. An historical problem stretching back to the dawn of Hollywood, it persists in the Star Wars and Marvel franchises (see 2016′s Doctor Strange, above), and in Western adaptations of anime classics such as 2017′s Ghost in the Shell, to name a few. “

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

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

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.

SAMPAN, “Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Asian Cultural Appropriation,” May 24, 2022

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RELATED WORKS

• Asian futures, without Asians live version
• Virtually Asian video
• Seedy Space Ports and Colony Planets: Asian Conical Hats in Cinematic Dystopia visual essay
• On the Neon Horizon video
• Tang Rainbow mural
• Asian futures, without Asians multipart research series, which includes videos, installations, collages, essays, publications, and other projects