![]() But if the nuances of techno-Orientalism evolve with the times, visions of Asia-futurism continue to be mirrored, magnified, and distorted in the Western world toward complicated ends, with complicated effects on both contemporary art production and an already troubled construction of Asian American identity.Īmid the contentious identity politics of this year’s Academy Awards, host Chris Rock introduced three children of Asian descent to the stage as accountants and smartphone makers. Focusing on Japan, Ueno wrote, “It is through this mirror stage and its cultural apparatus that Western or other people misunderstand and fail to recognize an always illusory Japanese culture, but it also is the mechanism through which Japanese misunderstand themselves.”Īs the worldwide preoccupation in the 1980s with Japan’s unassailably ascendant technological dominance has given way to worldwide consternation over the still-unfolding effects of neoliberal globalization on an array of Pacific Rim nations, the idea that East Asian countries have any exceptional claim to futurity has grown more complex. Perhaps, critic Toshiya Ueno suggested, techno-Orientalism loops back on itself or serves as “a kind of mirror stage or an image machine” whose effects ultimately touch everyone. Yet even as their words set the stage for many a conversation about the formation and transformation of Asian identity through the channels of diaspora and distance, ever-newer avatars of techno-Orientalism continue to be reflected in both high art and low culture. Specifically, a Japan that had managed “an unintelligible paradox, to transform the power of territoriality and feudalism into that of deterritoriality and weightlessness.” “Japan,” he continued, “is already a satellite of the planet Earth.” Taking up where he left off, David Morley and Kevin Robins laid out an articulation of techno-Orientalism a few years later, observing that Japan’s path to modernization had become a crucial aspect of its exoticized image as an Oriental other, an image construed to reflect the same Western anxieties that drove the historical violence of colonialism, racism, and exclusion. In 1986, describing the United States, Jean Baudrillard touched on what the country was not: Japan. ![]() In previous decades there were, of course, Nam June Paik’s televisions and robots, then Lee Bul’s cyborgs now one finds the trippy digital self-portraits of Lu Yang, and Transmedia Lab’s robot arm programmed to duplicate Buddhist scripture. ![]() Meanwhile, recent art history serves up examples of Asian artists (and East Asian artists in particular) whose pieces lay ground for even more fantastic futures to come: narratives populated by cyborg love and virtual-reality metropolises. Vivid tableaux of the continent’s cities in hyperdrive, fueled by tech-enabled consumerism, come to mind with ease: Think of the vertical neon signs, the sleep-deprived gamers, the flesh-meets-machine of conveyor-belt sushi. IS IT POSSIBLE to be othered across time? For almost a century already, the myth of an Asian-inflected future has infiltrated imaginations worldwide. Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell, 1995, 35 mm, color, sound, 82 minutes.
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