View On the Neon Horizon below

Fantastical mise en scène, breathtaking B-roll footage, and special effects deliriums from four decades of mainstream sci-fi by white American, Australian, Canadian, European, and New Zealander filmmakers craft an insidiously Asian futurescape — sometimes achieved by simply shooting in a present-day Asian country or a North American Chinatown. In aggregate, these productions inextricably tether non-white cultures to criminality and contagion, portraying Asian cultures and people as existential threats to white Western ideas of freedom. Prominent signage in Chinese and Japanese (stand-ins for some of America and Canada’s oldest scapegoats), as well as in Arabic, Hindi, Korean, and Thai, from more than a dozen futuristic movies and TV shows, provide copious examples of the racism embedded in and promoted by Hollywood.

On the Neon Horizon (8:27 minutes, 2023) was commissioned by BlackFlash Expanded and is part of Astria Suparak’s ongoing research project, Asian futures, without Asians, which is a taxonomy of how white mainstream filmmakers depict future worlds that are Asian-inflected, while simultaneously sidelining or disappearing the progenitors of those diverse Asian cultures. 

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Feature image: Astria Suparak, video still from On the Neon Horizon, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Image description: An image of a futuristic city with neon signs and holographic projections on the sides of tall buildings. On top of the image large neon pink text reads: “A Glittering Future.”

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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, colonialism) made accessible through a popular culture lens, such as science fiction movies, rock music, and sports. Straddling creative and scholarly work, the projects often take the form of publicly available tools and databases, chronicling subcultures and omitted perspectives.

Over the last year Suparak’s creative projects have been exhibited and performed at MoMA, ICA LA, the Walker Art Center, the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and as part of the For Freedoms billboard series. She has curated exhibitions, screenings, and performances for art institutions and festivals including the Liverpool Biennial, Museo Rufino Tamayo, The Kitchen, Eyebeam, MoMA PS1, 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. [www.astriasuparak.com]

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