An amalgamated skyline of Asian futures imagined by white filmmakers. Sourced from sci-fi movies and television shows that depict a vice-ridden, dangerous world overtly marked with elements of East, Southeast, and South Asian architecture.
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Asian futures, without Asians multimedia performance
This live cinema work is illustrated with images and clips from futuristic films and TV shows. Accompanied by a live musical soundtrack, Suparak delivers anecdotes, trivia, and documents from the histories of art, architecture, fashion, film, religion, and science.
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 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.
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
“A statement show […] 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, and a frame for the looping video Tropicollage.
Tang Rainbow
The mural Tang Rainbow, which wraps around 3 sides of a wall, displays an arc of non-Asian actors outfitted in Chinese-influenced costumes across 50 years of science fiction cinema.
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
GIF-ified glitches of Techno-Orientalist fantasies, this 3-channel video work shows how koi are used to embellish the scenery in Hollywood sci-fi.
Imaginary Worlds on Asian Futures, Without Asians
“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.”
MONDAY Art Journal: Lux Aeterna
MONDAY considers how technological, economic, and cultural forces shape the ways we produce, share, and experience media — and how that media in turn influences our values and aesthetics.
Media-N Journal review of Virtually Asian
“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.”
Astria Suparak 