“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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
“A statement show […] The Hearing Trumpet, with work by the video artist Astria Suparak, the ceramicist Heidi Lau and others, opened Saturday.”
An installation that collages white men outfitted in Hawaiian shirts while vacationing in future foreign lands, and a frame for the looping video Tropicollage.
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.
“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.”
“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.”
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.
“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 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.
“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.”
“Peggy Ahwesh and Astria Suparak offer inventive perspectives of Western influences on Asian cinema and and Asian influences on Western cinema.” Two-week run at The Walker.
Part critical analysis, part reflective essay and sprinkled throughout with humor, justified anger, and informative morsels, this illustrated presentation examines 60 years of American science fiction cinema through the lens of Asian appropriation and whitewashing.
Billboard created for For Freedoms by Stop DiscriminAsian.
A short video essay that looks at how white science fiction filmmakers fill the backgrounds of their futuristic worlds with hollow Asian figures while the main cast (if not the entirety of their fictional universe’s population) is devoid of actual Asian people.
Astria Suparak 