EXCELSIOR
EXCELSIOR
Still image of "Genetic Salon I & II, director cut"
by Bobby Yu Shuk Pui
CURATED BY JOB PISTON
PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP
WITH NOWNESS
Excelsior—named after the starship led by Captain Sulu of Star Trek and meaning ‘onward and upwards’ – is a public presentation curated by Job Piston for the Art at a Time Like This fall program, featuring artists of Asian descent in visual and live arts.
This exhibition embodies the diversity of experience and outlook of 8 artists, from the video essay of Astria Suparak, underscoring the absence of Asian actors in blockbuster Hollywood films set in Asia to Lu Yang’s powerful alter ego, DOKU. On view is a wide range of Asian American and Asian diaspora artists who defy adversity or familial history through the use of constructing new mythologies, alternate realities, and cinematic dreamscapes. They paint a multinational landscape inhabited by fictional, or at times dystopic, heroines. Fabled empresses, fashionistas, pop singers, queer goddesses, genetic nurses, and a digital avatar take viewers on a journey into a world that blends reality with fantasy.
Doku: Digital Alaya (excerpt) by Lu Yang
DOKU Digital Alaya, 2021, courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery
Lu Yang is at the forefront of the generation of artists from China, born in the 1980s whose lives paralleled the growth of a global economy. In Lu Yang’s world, cultures collide, the digital realm prevails, and religions must be reinterpreted. These artworks--packed with avatars, while grounded in the latest scientific inquiries—are wildly engaging and often disturbing, creating post-human life forms in a world dominated by Japanese anime and interactive video games.
To create a life-like digital post-human, Lu Yang collaborates with a team of scientists, 3D animators and digital technicians using motion capture, detailing the features of her face and facial expressions so that the avatar, Doku, looks remarkably like its creator. Body movements are also generated through motion capture of dancers and musicians, providing Doku with a perfect androgynous body. The artist is reborn repeatedly as a nonbinary, androgynous, ever-present avatar, capable of talents beyond physical limitations. This video is an excerpt of an exhibition where Doku appears in six different settings that Lu Yang creates herself using 3D digital techniques.
Installation Photograph of DOKU Digital Alaya, 2021, courtesy of Jane Lombard Gallery
Still images of Virtually Asia by Astria Suparak
Virtually Asia by Astria Suparak
Virtually Asian is a short video essay that looks at how white science-fiction filmmakers fill the backgrounds of their futuristic worlds with hollow Asian figures — in the form of video and holographic advertisements — while the main cast (if not the entirety of their fictional universe’s population) is devoid of actual Asian people.
With examples from major sci-fi productions spanning four decades, the video reveals this trope as a poor attempt to mask white supremacist imagination and casting. This well-trodden shortcut is meant to create the appearance of a diverse world without hiring non-white people in any significant capacity (in front of or behind the camera).
Still images of Virtually Asia by Astria Suparak
In a mysterious technological world, people’s lives are full of uncertainty, while the power to be able to “randomly switch options” makes us willing to wait at all costs.
In her film series Genetic Salon, Yu Shuk Pui places us in the starkness of a minimalist waiting room, allowing the audience to select their own sequence of the story by choosing between multiple possible narrative outcomes. In this dystopic short film, patients review a menu to redesign their own human DNA to change small features or fulfil fantasies as drastic as to embody the lives of land mammals, insects or species of trees and exotic flowers. The artist has spent years interviewing genetic scientists in both Norway and Hong Kong to collect background and research for the script. Her short films unfold the fascinations and deep ethical concerns of genetic science through this pensive cinematic melodrama.
Bobby Yu Shuk Pui is a Hong Kong artist and director based in Oslo. She has created a director's cut on the occasion of 'Excelsior.'
Genetic Salon I & II, Directors Cut, 2022 by Bobby Yu Shuk Pui
Bobby Yu Pui @bobbyyushukpui
Still images of Genetic Salon I & II by Bobby Yu Shuk Pui
Watermelon Love, 2017 by Ming Wong & Yu Cheng-Ta
Ming Wong is a Singaporean-German visual artist based in Berlin and Yu Cheng-Ta is a visual artist based in Taiwan who collaborate on video, installation and performance to create satirical artworks that poke at archetypes of cinema, opera and advertising. Together they have produced Watermelon Love, a music video and story of two fabled empresses who descend from the clouds to liberate society from its patriarchal repression. Combining their love of 1960’s Chinese opera and music videos, the artists roleplay gender-fluid mortal sisters who disrupt mortal gender conventions with absurdity. They party-crash on motorcycles to twerk and booty shake through the city in this surrealist short comedy.
Still images of Watermelon Love, 2017 by Ming Wong & Yu Cheng-Ta
Prumsodun Ok is a dancer and activist who founded Cambodia's first gay mens dance company that restages Khmer classical dances which have traditionally been only performed by women in public.
This music video directed by Ok is the debut of the recording artist Sopharoth, a principal dancer of the company, and marks the launch of Sereiyos, a creative agency and production company bringing together the director's experiences in dance, film, music, and design. Sopharoth first wowed audiences with a performance for government officials of the Royal Government of Cambodia during a closed-door conference on marriage equality. This was a driving factor behind the music video and single which rearranged the traditional melody Lao Chom Chan, a beloved piece in Cambodia, Thailand, and Laos.
Love Adrift, 2022 by Sopharoth & Prumsodun Ok
Still images of Love Adrift, 2022 by Sopharoth & Prumsodun Ok
Still image of MOTHERNIGHT by Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo
MOTHERNIGHT by Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo, 2020
MOTHERNIGHT combines sci-fi horror, folktales, & historical narratives to form a probing investigation on how power and male lineage are inherently linked to the institution of the family. It unveils how colonial legacies and war histories are inherently connected to patriarchal violence and Western domination while pondering new means of kinship beyond racial belonging.
Based on Japanese nursemaid lullabies, Chinese village ghost operas, the Korean shaman tale of Princess Bari and the iconic South Korean films, “The Housemaid” & “Lady Vengeance", MOTHERNIGHT combines collage storytelling in order to reveal how personal as well as collective histories intersect throughout various cultures and time periods. The project seeks to adopt empathetic strategies that resist historical oppression & attempts to reconcile the past while posing critical questions on the future of kinship, relationships, adoption and the descent of fear
Still image of MOTHERNIGHT by Christa Joo Hyun D'Angelo
Durian Pharmaceutical Advertisement, 2020 by FAMEME
In this advertisement, FAMEME attempts to utilize the latest marketing trend and media obsession to promote a new product for his own capitalist needs.
FAMEME is a character who explores the cultural phenomenon of “influencers” in Western social media alongside celebrity and food trends in a series of performances that appropriate the visual language of reality television. FAMEME is an Asian billionaire farmer who travels to New York City to promote durian—a thorny, odorous, tropical fruit indigenous to Southeast Asia. The project depicts an outsider’s quest for fame and acceptance in American culture through the world of social media influencers.
In 2019, FAMEME opened the "Museum of Durian" in SOHO New York City as part of the Performa Biennial, as well as a video billboard takeover of the Times Square EDITION in Father Duffy Square.
FAMEME @FAMEMENYC
Tattoos and scars bear lasting witness to memories, pain, and trauma—a mode of knowledge inscribed directly into the body. Kang Seung Lee scanned the skin of friends in his queer community of artists and activists: Julie Tolentino, Jen Smith, Jennifer Moon, and Young Joon Kwak, mapping a multigenerational fabric of embodied experiences. - Harry Burke
Portraiture traditionally engages viewers through the eyes and body language in order to express a kind of intimacy between the artist and sitter. In an unexpected twist, here the bodies of activists press with force against a flatbed scanner drawing viewers into a silent scrolling meditation while simultaneously protecting access to the sitter's private lives. The portraits are abstracted as a result of the process, pushing up against an image's threshold, expressing a psychological resilience and defiance of each participant.
Skin, 2021, by Kang Seung Lee
Kang Seung Lee @kangseunglee
Still Imagine by Skin, 2021, by Kang Seung Lee
Job Piston is a curator, artist, and artistic director based in New York City and Los Angeles. He is known for his expertise in producing new multidisciplinary artworks examining identity and gender politics in a biennial format with artists in visual arts, photography, video, and live performance.
As a curator at Performa Biennial, Piston has organized performances by visual artists including Barbara Kruger, Tania Bruguera, Zanele Muholi, Sara Cwynar, Kia LaBeija, Shikeith, and Korakrit Arunanondachai with Alex Gvojic and boychild. He presented the program TIME SHARE which juxtaposed archival performance material with video art, digital media, dance, and protest performances. Piston has produced independent projects with Jacolby Satterwhite, Hayal Pozanti, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, recording artist Tinashe, and a mixtape program with Jessica Silverman Gallery. Piston received his MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BFA at the California College of the Arts. He is on advisory committees of The Bronx Museum of the Art, Downtown4Democracy, and Baxter Street at Camera Club of New York.
NOWNESS is a global video channel screening the best in culture, a movement for creative excellence in storytelling celebrating the extraordinary of every day. Launched in 2010, NOWNESS’ unique programming strategy has established it as the go-to source of inspiration and influence across art, design, fashion, beauty, music, food, and travel. Our curatorial expertise and award-winning approach to storytelling is unparalleled. We work with exceptional talent, and both established and emerging filmmakers, which connects our audience to emotional and sensorial stories designed to provoke inspiration and debate. NOWNESS launched a Chinese-language site in 2012 and NOWNESS ASIA in 2020. Since 2013, videos are available in up to 10 languages—including English, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, and Russian (simply turn on subtitles on our player).
Special thanks to our supporters, especially Sue Stoffel and Robert V. Hansmann who made this program possible.