In Astria Suparak’s ongoing multimedia performance Asian futures, without Asians, the artist argues that science fiction is not a modern invention descended from the imagination of the West. Instead, she presents Asian cultural materials from across six centuries that feature concepts—such as eternal life, astrology, divination, and the apocalypse—and motifs—the cosmos, magical and mythical creatures, and deities—intrinsic to present-day science-fiction and fantasy.
Suparak made virtual backdrops for her performances of Asian futures, without Asians using a different Asian cultural artifact for each venue. Her artist’s project for X-TRA, Ancient Sci-Fi, comprises limited-edition posters based on these backdrops. Each printed copy of the issue includes one of the four designs. These backdrops are also available as digital downloads on our website.
In the conversation that follows, 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.
DOROTHY R. SANTOS In rereading your work, Asian futures, without Asians, I was reminded of your cultural and anthropological excavation of the more than sixty sci-fi films and TV shows that you included in your research. I witnessed the first iterations of your work for the Wattis Institute publication Why are they so afraid of the lotus?, which was focused on Trinh T. Minh-ha’s films. In that piece, you say: “Asian as a costume, a temporary skin, a vacation. An eccentricity, an indication of rank, and a means of self-discovery.” Clearly, there’s some clever tongue-in-cheek happening here, as if one needs to be overtly absurd about an identity, a people, a person serving as a proxy for objects and signifiers! Clearly, an Asian is not a costume or a skin, but Asian is used as a stand-in for something abstract and rather difficult to explain happening in the world. For instance, you astutely point out Alexis Rhee, a Korean American, playing a geisha in an advertisement within the backdrop of Ridley Scott’s 1982 Blade Runner. Her figure serves as a stand-in, both literally and figuratively; the director invokes her likeness as a way of speaking on behalf of, as opposed to what Trinh’s work encourages us to do: to “speak nearby.”1 This method of speaking nearby might prevent these blatant forms of cultural appropriation and misrepresentation. Rhee’s visual presence becomes a part of an American imaginary that is extremely difficult to undo, unsee, and unlearn. Yet it serves as a looming presence.
You branched off after Why are they so afraid of the lotus? and started to create other multimedia works focused on various related themes and tropes, even nonhuman mediations. (I’m thinking of For Ornamental Purposes [2022].) I’m curious how the work you developed during our time at the Wattis has expanded and led to other artworks and projects.
ASTRIA SUPARAK The whole Asian futures, without Asians series started as research for that visual essay for the Wattis book. I was so enthralled by the research—culling imagery from dozens of mainstream science-fiction movies and TV shows, and writing well beyond the word limit—that I also developed a multimedia presentation that I’ve been touring with for the last year. It was originally going to be performed in person in San Francisco, but we had to postpone and then move it online because of the pandemic. The Ancient Sci-Fi (2021–22) backdrops were designed for the performance, with a different Asian cultural artifact for each venue.
At an hour long and stuffed with over three hundred slides, the presentation was still not enough to contain the rabbit holes I journeyed into while researching and making the essay and lecture. I’ve expanded some parts into other projects, like a visual essay and collage on the Asian Conical Hat trope. And I’ve made new work for things that didn’t fit, like the Tropicollage (2021) video and Aloha, Boys (2022) wall piece, on how the tropics are fetishised. Some of the slides in the presentation are collages of images of the most persistent tropes, and I’ve made murals and installations based on these, such as Sympathetic White Robots (2021–22) and Tang Rainbow (2022), on Chinese-ish costumes seen across half a century of white-made sci-fi. I also made GIFs for the presentation, which I’m trying to figure out how to include in other works, for example, the koi in For Ornamental Purposes.
Virtually Asian (2021) is the penultimate section of the presentation—a trope I call Giant Geisha Ads—which I turned into my first short video. It is a stand-alone work and also slots into the performance.
SANTOS I also thought about mythologies around specific types of artifacts and fashion when parsing Asian Futures. A few years ago, I was talking to artist Kimberley Arteche about the Barong Tagalog.2 She mentioned the mythology of why a translucent piece of clothing had to be worn a specific way (tucked vs. untucked) by Filipinos. Apocryphally, the creation of the clothing was predicated on the Spaniards wanting to ensure that Filipinos were not concealing weapons. Keeping mythmaking in mind, I’m wondering if there is a particular image or mediation of an Asian artifact that has presented a challenge for you in terms of finding little to no historical lineage or archival frame of reference?
SUPARAK That (possible) backstory for the Barong Tagalog brings up so much. I’m now thinking of the idea of translucency and opaqueness in clothing, and how European colonizers forced their puritanical traditions upon people living in the tropics, making them wear specific types of clothing because of the Europeans’ inability or unwillingness to stop sexualizing us and viewing us through their narrow value systems.
When I was researching the histories and varieties of Asian conical hats, I was hoping to find the oldest image of this type of hat. I kept stumbling upon variations of a story that the nón lá was carved on a third–century bronze drum from what is now Vietnam. But when I looked at images of that drum, it was not clear to me that a conical hat is depicted. I’m happy to be corrected, but I didn’t feel confident enough with what I found to include it in my work. That’s actually what a lot of the research is, eliminating dozens of possibilities to confirm one thing, to phrase one line accurately! Or dropping a line of inquiry because the imagery isn’t legible enough. Certain artifacts repeatedly appear in the background of films, often out of focus or dimly lit. I have a whole set of images of hookahs in the futurescape, but they’re a bit too spindly to read easily.
Learning about cultural elements that change over time and across geography is fascinating, particularly when they’ve come to (or were invented with the intent to) symbolize a nation, like pad thai or the tángzhuāng jacket—which was called “fake antique” by Chinese scholars of dress3 (and referenced in Tang Rainbow).
SANTOS In the spirit of Saidiya Hartman’s concept of critical fabulation, I’m also curious about your specific methodology of searching for meaning in specific symbols and artifacts through their historical and cultural contexts.4
SUPARAK It’s not so much fabulation or searching for meaning, necessarily, but maybe looking for signs of reification? Interpreting how these artifacts and concepts are being used in a white Western context, and then developing a critical response that addresses the ahistorical use of these specific, and sometimes non-specific, Asian imageries and ideas.
My process for this research started with watching a ton of sci-fi and screen grabbing any element I recognized as or suspected was Asian—inclusive of East, Southeast, South, Central, and West Asia. I organized them into categories, and the recurring elements then guided my research, leading me to more areas to look into. This included many histories and cultures I wasn’t as familiar with, and eventually, I connected with outside experts to double- and triple-check cultural, religious, and language details with people of those cultures and religions and/or experts in those areas, including fashion historians, architects, and martial artists. I did this in order to better understand the objects, names, and customs represented and the significance of how they were being appropriated and stripped of their cultural and historical specificities in the interest of creating a dystopian future for white protagonists.
Beyond the usual historical/cultural/museum sources, I’m also reading and listening to interviews with film directors, production designers, art directors, costume designers, and even the linguists who invent alien languages, and I’m delving into platforms like fan sites, military wikis, and weapons forums.
Building this taxonomy is a way to retrain one’s viewing habits. I’ll often go back to a film to pull a better still, a better clip, or tweak the subtitle settings, once I’ve figured out what I need, and find more objects or tropes I didn’t catch the first time. I can’t watch a film anymore without clocking a Buddha figurine in the background, no matter how blurry!
SANTOS I want to go back to something you touched upon earlier that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about: Fidelity! Your response regarding “dropping a line of inquiry” due to illegibility. There’s a double meaning, maybe even a visual double-edged sword, with the low resolution of these images. It seems that many of these artifacts, especially when mediated through film or digital media (whether through some form of digital photography or in post-production), serve a dual purpose. In one sense, cultural objects or elements are sprinkled throughout media to provide what scholar Koichi Iwabuchi calls a “cultural odor.”5 Your work forces the viewer to question how much an object resembles the country from which it allegedly originates. How much of the object you are examining resembles or is connected to the place it ought to represent? In another sense, the other side of an object’s mediation rests with the viewer and their willingness to either accept or question the way an object is mediated. Herein lies the responsibility of the filmmaker and artist!
I’ve always understood your work and scholarship as a way of encouraging individuals to put in the work to understand the way that something is created, designed, and then wielded as a part of the visual language and how those signifiers start to seep into both individual and collective consciousness and imagination. Taking all of this into consideration, are there films, television shows, or performances that you feel do an excellent job of striking the balance between honoring historical and cultural lineages without being appropriative— works that are imaginative, forward thinking, and speculative in a way that is generative?
SUPARAK Everything Everywhere All at Once, by the filmmaker duo Daniels [Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert] does this! In its writing, casting, costuming (shout out to Shirley Kurata), setting, and set design, there’s an attention to detail and a deep understanding of what it means to be Chinese, Chinese American, and Asian American. The messiness, the mixture of identities, cultures, and languages that diasporic people understand—not the mix-and-match of the appropriation we see in so many white productions, like Firefly and Star Wars. It’s not locked in a historical and rigid idea of Asianness, nor is it trying to create a bland “universal” aesthetic supposedly devoid of cultural references (haha, as if). It also has specificity, without being clichéd.
And in terms of rounding out a prodigiously recreated period in American history that has always been whitewashed and never centers Asian Americans, there’s Warrior, set in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the late 1870s. The show, based on Bruce Lee’s concept and executively produced by his daughter Shannon Lee, has some fun, ahistorical constructions, like the hairstyles and costuming of madam and swordswoman Ah Toy, whose character is loosely based on the first Chinese sex worker in San Francisco.6 I also like to point people to Random Acts of Flyness by Terence Nance and his many collaborators, which is the most experimental show on mainstream television.
And unlike the previous Mad Maxes, Mad Max: Fury Road—while overwhelmingly white and non-Indigenous—has a fashion and design aesthetic that isn’t clearly biting non-white or Aboriginal cultures, although the movie does briefly appear in the architecture section of my presentation, in the context of mashrabiya and jali.
SANTOS: I’m thrilled you mentioned Everything Everywhere All at Once (EEAAO)! I watched EEAAO with my partner and mentioned how the overall aesthetic reminded me of the DJ Snake and Lil Jon video for “Turn Down for What.” It was a pleasant surprise to learn the same team that made that music video also made EEAAO. I agree with your observations of how the Daniels manage the menagerie of people, places, dimensions, and objects within the multiverse of visual scapes. The quick changes Evelyn and Joy experience—jumping through portals and morphing into alternate versions of themselves—mimic, in many ways, how it feels to live as an Asian parent with an Asian American child in the United States. I, certainly, have felt this way with my own mother.
One more thing. I couldn’t help but think of Sarah Ahmed’s concept of queer phenomenology,7 and it seems apropos since we’re talking about EEAAO. How might a queering of Asian clothes, artifacts, and elements within film and digital media look in the future? What does it mean for artists and filmmakers to be forward thinking and imaginative while honoring and respecting culture?
SUPARAK I’m not sure if I can answer that, but that’s the future (and present) I want to see more of, where cultures are respected and also where we have the latitude to be irreverent and poke fun at ourselves, with actual knowledge, embodied understanding, and a loving critique of our own cultures (in the widest interpretation). A question I get fairly often from white students after a presentation is: “Why can’t I use elements from [fill in the blank] culture for my own work? I love that culture!” My answer is usually some variation of: It’s a question of power. Which group has political, cultural, and economic power over the other group, historically and globally? In filmmaking, the answer is always going to be white America and Hollywood. That’s why a negative stereotype of a white person in a few films produced in China will never create the amount of harm that a century of Asian stereotypes produced by white American films has had globally.
I’ll recommend a couple other TV shows that are also fiercely imaginative and irreverent: Reservation Dogs (Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi) and Atlanta (Donald Glover, with some brilliant directing by Hiro Murai).
And to come back to EEAAO (spoilers!): What saves the day isn’t physical dominance (although there are plenty of thrilling, kick-ass action scenes by one of the best in the biz, Michelle Yeoh). It’s the unheralded strength of a kind and tender Asian man, as recognized and strategically used by a middle-aged Asian woman. Her character, at the heart of the story, occupies a demographic that is completely devalued in mainstream American movies. This subversion upends the noxious white Western stereotype of the emasculated Asian male. An Asian male Marvel superhero isn’t the only answer (but thank you for your service, Simu Liu and Kumail Nanjiani). Softness is also a power. Turning Red by Domee Shi and Ms. Marvel, created by Bisha K. Ali, have similar family dynamics as EEAAO, with immigrant mothers as the strong backbones of the family and gentle, encouraging fathers.
I’ll also point out that these wonderful productions by, and representations of, Asian Americans that we’ve mentioned here have all come out in the last year, and are mostly from the Chinese diaspora. I am bringing this up because you and I are Southeast Asian—a group that is hugely underrepresented in comparison to East and South Asians. Southeast Asians make up about 37% of the Asian American population,8 but of the mainstream US films from the last five years that actually feature Asian and Pacific Islander actors in the main title casts, only 3% of the roles are Southeast Asian.9
SANTOS: While that statistic is abysmal, it’s certainly not surprising. My hope for the not so distant future is that this percentage increases significantly and that our exchange in these pages serves as a part of the ongoing direct action to effect change in film and television. This reminds me of Joanne Rondilla’s scholarship and research on colorism in the Philippines. When I think of the statistics you shared, more often than not, it’s light-skinned Southeast Asians that get cast as leads or as a part of a larger cast or ensemble. Rondilla’s work is vital when thinking about how AAPI representation in media has evolved since the sci-fi and popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s.
Also, I appreciate you bringing up Harjo, Waititi, and Glover as writers and creators affecting much needed change in the realms of film and television. Their writing is phenomenal, and I’m optimistic we’ll see more popular media from Indigenous writers as well. There’s so much more to reflect on and unpack, but I wanted to close by asking if you have any final thoughts you’d like to share.
SUPARAK I’m glad you brought up Hartman’s idea of critical fabulation. We continue to see scads of movies, TV shows, and video games depicting Medieval Europe or inspired by it (looking at you, Game of Thrones and Lord of the Ring franchises), but these are whitewashed, alternative histories that help fuel white nationalists. People of color have been living in Europe since at least the third century, alongside transcontinental migration, trade, and diplomatic exchange.10 Perhaps these incessant productions of a falsely racially homogenous Europe are uncritical fabulations?
My project Ancient Sci-Fi partly came out of a lifetime of being told to look at white European architecture as the apex of culture and refinement. Over the pandemic, I was looking at historical Asian architecture online to help fill in a huge gap in my education. And damn, our ancestors have built awe-inspiring, gorgeous, genius creations, like Angkor Wat and Borobudur, that should be known as widely as the Acropolis or St. Mark’s Cathedral.
Astria Suparak is an artist, writer, and curator based in Oakland, California. Her cross-disciplinary projects address complex and urgent issues, like institutionalized racism, feminisms and gender, and colonialism, made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as sci-fi movies, rock music, and sports. Over the last year, Suparak’s creative projects have been exhibited and performed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. She has curated exhibitions, screenings, and performances for the Liverpool Biennial; Museo Rufino Tamayo, Mexico City; The Kitchen and Eyebeam, in New York; and Expo Chicago, as well as for unconventional spaces, such as roller-skating rinks, sports bars, and rock clubs. Suparak is the winner of the 2022 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Award.
Dorothy R. Santos (she/they) is a Filipino American writer, artist, and educator whose academic and research interests include feminist media histories, critical medical anthropology, computational media, technology, race, and ethics. She is a PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media and Eugene V. Cota-Robles fellow at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her work has been exhibited at Ars Electronica Festival, Linz, Austria; Rewire Festival, the Hague, Netherlands; Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and the GLBT Historical Society, in San Francisco. Her writing appears in art21, Art in America, Ars Technica, Hyperallergic, Rhizome, and Vice Motherboard. She is the Executive Director for the Processing Foundation; and serves as an advisory board member for POWRPLNT, Brooklyn; slash art, San Francisco; and House of Alegria.