Aloha, Boys

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Detail of installation, “Aloha, Boys,” by Astria Suparak at Galerie Marguo, Paris, 2022
Detail of installation, “Aloha, Boys,” by Astria Suparak at Galerie Marguo, Paris, 2022
Sketch up for “Aloha, Boys,” by Astria Suparak at Galerie Marguo, Paris, 2022

“Aloha, Boys”

Astria Suparak
Installation (digital collage on vinyl, looping video), 7′ wide x 9′ high (dimensions variable)
2022
https://bit.ly/aloha-boys

This wall piece collages various white men outfitted in “Hawaiian shirts” (which are based on aloha shirts), while vacationing in future foreign lands or living in Asian-inflected worlds devoid of Asian people.

Aloha, Boys was created to frame Astria Suparak’s looping video Tropicollage and is sourced from thirty years of futuristic sci-fi movies and television shows that employ a fetishized tropics trope. It is one part of Suparak’s ongoing research project, Asian futures, without Asians.

“The tropics exist as a dreamy respite from ‘real’ life …for some people. But it’s not a holiday for the 3.2 billion people who live in the tropical zone. White-made media reinforces a racialized, exotic vacation trope, training their cameras on and constructing sets with gangly palm trees, pristine beaches, glistening oceans, and deferential Pacific Islander, Asian, Caribbean, and/or Indigenous peoples. This is the cherry-picked, colonialist view of tropical lands, which are presented as escapist fantasies and prizes for white Americans and Europeans. 

People of color are the global majority and within a couple decades the tropics will be home to more than half of the world’s population. Yet white science fiction filmmakers and television creators insist on creating protagonists from a white minority who sojourn to a distant, tropical paradise centuries and millennia into the future.”
– Astria Suparak, Tropicollage 

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EXHIBITION

THE HEARING TRUMPET, PART II
Organized by Danielle Shang
Galerie Marguo, Paris
May 7 – June 18, 2022 — extended to June 21

Artists: Carl Cheng, Odonchimeg Davaadorj, Damien H. Ding, Heidi Lau, LIU Xin, Amanda Ross-Ho, Runo B, Catalina Ouyang, Dianna Settles, Kyungmi Shin, Astria Suparak, Ziping Wang, Miranda Fengyuan Zhang, and Stella Zhong.

The exhibition, titled after Leonora Carrington’s fantastical 1974 novel, features artists whose eloquent articulations result from their critical quest into the past and imaginative investment in the present.

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PRESS

T: NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE, “Paris, Europe’s Former Art Capital, Is Back on Top,” Noor Brara, May 4, 2022 [in print May 8]

Excerpt:

“‘The Hearing Trumpet,’ a recent group show of theirs inspired by the hopeful and radical world-building in the artist and writer Leonora Carrington’s 1974 surrealist novel of the same name, brought together work by Asian artists living in cities across the Americas and Europe. Ms. Guo describes it as a statement show. […] ‘I think it had a really good impact.’ So much that a second installment of ‘The Hearing Trumpet,’ with work by the video artist Astria Suparak, the ceramicist Heidi Lau and others, opened Saturday.

Ms. Guo also attributes the success of the show to a larger shift — away from stuffiness and localism”

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