This suite of sculptures and a wall piece draws upon imagery from sci-fi where pyramids signal an alien or futuristic world. Hovering over these fabrications and projections are the real-life pyramids conceived, designed, and built by humans living across ancient Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
Upcoming & recent exhibitions, performances, screenings, projects, publications.
(Updated April 2026)
“A collage of Caucasian actors in roles as emotionally complex robots, AIs and cyborgs. [The installation] questions who is granted the privilege of humanity and emotional depth in these techno-futuristic landscapes.”
Stephanie Syjuco invited nine artists to contribute short essays about their own work with archives to the monograph of her research-based practice, including Pio Abad, Gelare Khoshgozaran, Wendy Red Star, LJ Roberts, Astria Suparak, and Carmen Winant.
As the guest curator for the Film Series, Suparak crafted 1 year of programs around key ideas present in both the museum collection and her own practice, including science fiction and fantasy, architecture, sports, media criticism, diaspora and inheritance.
“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.”
“Suparak’s media archaeology disrupts these racialized imaginaries of AI and identifies openings for building future imaginaries otherwise.”
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
“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 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.
“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.”
Astria Suparak 