Asian Futures Without Asians
By Morgan Kowalewski
As the lights descended on the Stern Auditorium, a techno-futuristic song by Detroit-based musician Tammy Lakkis rang through the speakers while Astria Suparak strode down the aisle and onto the stage draped in an elegant tunic and elaborate headpiece, comprised of Asian elements, instantly grabbing the audience’s attention for her multimedia performance on the representation of Asian cultures in sci-fi films. (We’d like to note that costumes and makeup/hair were by Levon Kafafian and Jay Orellana, respectively.)
Suparak was hosted on U-M’s campus by the new Digital Studies Institute and DISCO Network programming “Search Engines” for the second in-person exhibition of her piece “Asian Futures, Without Asians.” The project exhibits eight tropes and various subtropes commonly used within Hollywood including martial arts, Shoji screens, hookah bars, Hindu and Buddhist statues, and other forms of orientalism. Using acclaimed films like Star Wars, The Fifth Element, Firefly, Demolition Man, Dr. Strange, and Ex Machina, Suparak illustrates the use of Asian cultures—but not Asian peoples—in creating sci-fi’s characters, settings, and worldbuilding.
Astria’s performance includes a wide variety of tropes, including ones beyond what Americans typically think about when they hear the word "Asian culture." For instance, she spent time discussing the representation of East Asian martial arts but also tropes like Islamic tiles, hookah, Ganesh, and wet markets and how they all contribute to Hollywood’s idea of “Asian.”
During her performance, Suparak explained how these films conflate Asian cultures by ignoring differences in nationality and ethnic groups, flattening Asia into a malleable, amorphous idea that can fit any story. But Suparak’s criticism of sci-fi comes from a place of love for the genre. After her performance, in a conversation with Dr. Tung-Hui Hu, Associate Professor of English at U-M, Suparak shared her nostalgia for the sci-fi films she watched growing up, and how her project hopes to inspire a more inclusive future for the genre. Throughout the event, Suparak exposed the way Hollywood’s production of sci-fi films excludes Asian peoples from the creative process of filmmaking, typecasting them into fleeting, peripheral, or even often invisible roles. She demonstrated how the lack of Asian voices both on and off the screen has led to a homogenization of all Asian cultures into a digestible, white-washed version draped onto white bodies.
Suparak argues a root cause of the misrepresentation of Asia in cinema is the lack of Asian voices in positions of authorship and production in these creative spaces. She poses the question: What do you define as “Asian” and how are these acclaimed films contributing to these definitions and our expectations of the genre?
Pulling from Doctor Strange, Suparak presented the trope of white characters extracting wisdom from Asian locals as a means of a character’s self-discovery. In the film, Dr. Strange goes on a journey of self-discovery to Tibet where a master, who is notably non-Asian, enlightens him in the practice of magic and martial arts.
Dr. Strange trains at the renowned Kamar-Taj, a temple inspired by a place that is allegedly in East Asia where he is surrounded by locals also training to become sorcerers. Although he is clearly not the most skilled trainee, he is able to train under elite, noble sorcerers, “excelling” quickly and becoming a hero for the masters and students of Kamar-Taj and their leader “The Ancient One.” Throughout the film, although the students at the temple learn practices originating from their vaguely Asian locale, the film’s main cast has a distinct lack of Asian peoples. Dr. Strange’s mentor and enemy, both masters of the “Mystic Arts” of Kamar-Taj, are a Black and a white man. Moreover, the leader they worship, a supreme sorcerer who has defended Earth from mystical threats for millennia, is Tilda Swinton, a white British actress in a bald cap.
Suparak explained with this example how, when sci-fi films do include Asian bodies, there’s a tendency to use them to decorate and add geographic context to an “exotic” scene or as a part of a clear “lesser” group to distinguish between two social classes, typically the rich and poor—in this case the skilled and unskilled, the heroes and pedestrians.
All throughout Suparak’s piece, I was constantly finding how my own favorite sci-fi films fell victim to her tropes. Some of my fondest memories of childhood are from watching Star Wars and The Dark Knight Trilogy with my dad. In Batman Begins, while traveling the world learning combat, Bruce Wayne is recruited to the League of Shadows, led by Ra’s al Ghul where he is trained in a homogenized Asian style of fighting, with little to no acknowledgement of the origin of this cultural knowledge.
Fueled by her own love of the genre, Suparak’s project doesn’t argue for the boycott of science fiction films. Rather, she calls for a more thoughtful, organic approach to authorship and representation of Asian culture and people in the genre, particularly after a time of increased hate crimes and hate speech towards Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Beyond countless examples of the misrepresentation of Asian cultures, Suparak ultimately leaves her audience with the confidence to question the sci-fi genre and the films its fans herald as groundbreaking, award-worthy, and or deserving of critical acclaim: a nuance that separates enjoyment from authorship.
