“This ground-breaking new history of modern art explores the relationship between art and knowledge from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.”
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WHITE ROBOT TEARS
“Suparak’s media archaeology disrupts these racialized imaginaries of AI and identifies openings for building future imaginaries otherwise.”
*NEWS*
Upcoming and recent exhibitions, performances, screenings, projects, publications.
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 primarily 21st century sci-fi movies and television shows, including an early example of techno-orientalism from the 1930s, these movies depict a vice-ridden, dangerous world with elements of East, Southeast, and South Asian architecture.
ASIAN FUTURES, WITHOUT ASIANS in-person performance
The much-anticipated performance debuted to a full house in the summer of 2023, and will continue to tour through winter.
ANCIENT SCI-FI
A set of backdrops containing concepts central to present-day sci-fi and fantasy, highlighting a sliver of the brilliance and beauty of Asian imagination and artistry across six centuries.
X-TRA Journal: Softness Is a Power: Astria Suparak in Conversation with Dorothy Santos
“Suparak and the writer and artist Dorothy R. Santos discuss Suparak’s ongoing scholarship, which, in addition to researching historical Asian artifacts that presage contemporary concepts of sci-fi, catalogs the appropriation of Asian objects and tropes in mainstream sci-fi films and television.”
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.
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.
A SIEVE FOR INFINITY
The works gathered together abstract, fragment, and accumulate: A murmuration of paint drops, a trussing of horsehide and metal, a tapestry chronicling genesis and apocalypse.
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SF Chronicle on 2022 Artadia Awards
“Bay Area visual artists Miguel Arzabe, Gregory Rick and Astria Suparak are the three recipients of the 15th annual San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Awards for 2022.”
Variable West on Asian Futures, Without Asians
“It was as if Everything Everywhere [All At Once] 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.”
T: New York Times Style Magazine
“Ms. Guo describes it as a statement show. […] a second installment of The Hearing Trumpet, with work by the video artist Astria Suparak, the ceramicist Heidi Lau and others, opened Saturday.”
ALOHA, BOYS
An installation that collages white men outfitted in Hawaiian shirts while vacationing in future foreign lands.
TANG RAINBOW
The 21-foot long mural Tang Rainbow is an array of non-Asian actors outfitted in Chinese-influenced costumes across 50 years of science fiction cinema and television.
South China Morning Post on For Ornamental Purposes
“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.
Ocula on For Ornamental Purposes
“Suparak’s three-channel video For Ornamental Purposes (2022) zooms in on the holographic koi fish sometimes used in Western sci-fi to signify a more global future.”
FOR ORNAMENTAL PURPOSES
A 3-channel video work shows us how koi are used to embellish the scenery in Hollywood sci-fi. GIF-ified, they are glitches of techno-Orientalist fantasies
Astria Suparak 