Upcoming & recent exhibitions, performances, screenings, projects, publications.
(Updated Dec. 2025)
Tag: 2023
Art and Knowledge After 1900 includes Asian Futures
“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.”
WHITE ROBOT TEARS
“Suparak’s media archaeology disrupts these racialized imaginaries of AI and identifies openings for building future imaginaries otherwise.”
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 sci-fi movies and television shows that depict a vice-ridden, dangerous world overtly marked with elements of East, Southeast, and South Asian architecture.
ASIAN FUTURES, WITHOUT ASIANS multimedia performance
This live cinema work, presented as a taxonomy of tropes, is illustrated with images and clips from futuristic movies and television shows. Accompanied by a live musical soundtrack, Suparak delivers anecdotes, trivia, and documents from the histories of art, architecture, design, fashion, film, food, religion, and weaponry.
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.
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.
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
TROPICOLLAGE
Short looping video that collages footage from 30 years of futuristic sci-fi movies and television shows that employ a fetishized tropics trope.
ASIAN FUTURES, WITHOUT ASIANS presentation
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.
VIRTUALLY ASIAN
Short video essay that looks at how white science fiction filmmakers fill the backgrounds of their futuristic worlds with hollow Asian figures—in the form of video and holographic advertisements—while the main cast (if not the entirety of their fictional universe’s population) is devoid of actual Asian people.
ASIAN FUTURES series
Series of projects, performances, and texts on how white filmmakers envision futures inflected by Asian culture, but devoid of actual Asian people. A visual analysis of 60 years of mainstream science-fiction cinema.
Joanie 4 Jackie
The complete archives of the influential underground film network for female filmmakers has been acquired by The Getty and is now viewable online. A selection of videos is available on the Criterion Channel (2020-Present).