8 Asian Women Artists Turning Folklore into Sci-Fi Visions

Many iconic moments in Western science fiction are visions of hyper-masculine conquest, imbued with orientalist overtones that often depict “the East” as an arcane, unknowable world. Today, moving beyond these entrenched biases, Asian women artists and collectives are working to reshape a genre too often defined by white male interests.

These eight artists—each tapping into their respective folklores and cultural histories—illuminate much deeper and more personal territory than the usual sci-fi fare. Their work was also recently featured at “New Eden: New Science Fiction Mythologies Transformed” at the ArtScience Museum in Singapore.

B. 1972, San Francisco. Lives and works in Los Angeles.

When it comes to subverting the mystique of Asia through Western eyes, Patty Chang’s installation Shangri-La (2005) is a perfect primer. Its main component is a 40-minute film in which Chang visits the Chinese city of Zhongdian, which was officially renamed Shangri-La City in 2001. In the film, the artist reveals the gulf between mundane tourism and the myth of a near-immortal paradise. The film loops next to its companion piece, a mirrored mountain sculpture that can be turned around like an abstract version of a Tibetan prayer wheel. Chang’s work was inspired by James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon (1933) where the European fantasy of the Himalayas concealing a cloud-wreathed mountain utopia originated.

Chang’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Hammer Museum, the Moderna Museet, and more. She has received numerous honors including the Rockefeller Foundation Grant and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. She teaches at the University of Southern California.

B. 1985, Tehran. Lives and works in New York.

Iranian Kurdish new media artist Morehshin Allahyari pointedly challenges digital colonialism in her research series “She Who Sees The Unknown” (2017–20). She uses Middle Eastern and North African mythologies to reshape heteropatriarchal traditions that define goddesses and oft-vilified female jinn (which comes from an Arabic word for demon or spirit). The series is made up of five multimedia installations that focus on different figures and aspects of mythology.

In the installation that introduces the nightmare-inducing jinn known as Kabous, Allahyari uses VR to create an intimate portrayal of war-driven dystopia, generational trauma, and salvation in the birth of a monstrous healer-daughter. In Huma, a fever-causing jinn is reimagined as a decolonizing entity that can control global warming. Allahyari’s work is connected to ongoing critical conversations around patriarchy, imperialism, and the environment.

Allahyari has received numerous awards and fellowships, most recently the United States Artist Fellowship in 2021. Her work has been shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, and more.

Yogyakarta, Indonesia–based collective The House of Natural Fiber was commissioned by the ArtScience Museum to produce Galactica v.2 Dharma Garden (2023), a new mixed-media installation that reimagines the Hindu goddess Lakshmi as an interstellar traveler arriving on new planets to terraform them into lush, thriving worlds.

A mural of fantastical godlike beings forms the backdrop for circular wall-mounted sculpture made with computer hardware: This is Lakshmi’s dharmic wheel-shaped ship—a green-lit glass cylinder of soil surrounded by eight ambiently swirling screens and softly beeping, terrarium-like environmental sensors. The wheel is a significant symbol in multiple Indian religions, but seen through the lens of Lakshmi—a goddess of agriculture, fertility, and prosperity—it evokes stewardship of life. It’s a thoughtful, technologically driven work that synthesizes the maternal aspect of the goddess with social and universal responsibilities, and the visual language of space travel.

The House of Natural Fiber is an interdisciplinary new media collective that explores social and environmental issues with an eye to practicality. In 2011, their installation Intelligent Bacteria – Saccharomyces cerevisiae won the transmediale award at Transmediale festival in Berlin. They have exhibited at new media space ESC in Austria, the Mal Au Pixel festival in Paris, and the Next Wave Festival in Melbourne.

B. 1994, Singapore. Lives and works in Newcastle, England.

Kara Chin’s gorgeous animation Awakening Ceremony (2021) intimately traces the evolution of domestic caregiving into rituals of worship. Against a vermillion-tiled kitchen tableau filled with kettles and robotic arms, small machines create their own life-giving ceremony to honor a large coffee dispenser. The palette is a technicolor version of a traditional Imari glaze, often used in Japanese porcelain exported to the West, but centered on the “Chinese red”—a talismanic shade in several Asian cultures that recurs throughout Chin’s practice, which also encompasses ceramic sculptures and installation. The result is a touching depiction of instinct and purpose, poking at the recurring ways in which we attempt to find meaning through technology, and the ease with which we identify with anthropomorphized objects.

Chin was selected for the U.K.’s annual New Contemporaries list in 2018, the same year she received the Woon Foundation Painting and Sculpture Prize. Her work was featured in the 8th International Triennial of Art and Ecology, and has been exhibited at galleries across the U.K. including Fieldworks, Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Arts, and The Milton Gallery. She is represented by VITRINE, which presented a solo booth by the artist at Frieze London 2023.

B. 1985, Tokyo. Lives and works in Tokyo.

Sputniko!’s installation Red Silk of Fate (2021) is created using threads spun by silkworms genetically engineered to create oxytocin-infused silk. Long banners of red silk form a shrine-shaped roof that fills the gallery, with a circular halo of the titular red threads in the middle. The work refers to the East Asian belief that true lovers are bound by a red thread. This traditional line of thought is embodied by the shrine structure, but is challenged by the modern sensibilities of the short film Red Silk of Fate – Tamaki’s Crush, which plays alongside it. It’s a raucous, technologically fueled take on the shoujo genre of romance comics aimed at young women. In the video, a lovesick scientist engineers a “red silk of fate” to win over her male colleague, but doesn’t quite anticipate the potency of her creation.

Sputniko!’s work has been exhibited around the world including at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum, MoMA, and Mori Art Museum, and at festivals like the Triennale di Milano and Setouchi Art Triennale. She has received many honors, including the 2020 ASIAGRAPH’s Tsumugi Award, and held design-focused teaching positions at MIT and the University of Tokyo.

In films, installations, and performance art, Club Ate reinvents myths and legends from the Philippines into new, spiritually driven “future folklore.” Last year, their installation ANG IDOL KO / YOU ARE MY IDOL (2022) drew connections between historical indigenous shamans called Babaylan in the region (who were often queer and trans) and queer and trans idols today.

Across their films, they explore the idea of a “skyworld,” which evokes the malleable and impermanent nature of the imagination, inspired by ancient Tagalog stories. The series of films “Ex Nilalang” (2015–16) deconstructs colonial narratives that have vilified queerness and otherness in Filipinx mythology. Each “episode” recasts a different spirit or monster into a powerful, yet vulnerable creature, creating a richer understanding of their culture.

The Club Ate collective is led by Justin Talplacido Shoulder and Bhenji Ra. Shoulder also makes performance work under the pseudonym Phasmahammer and is the co-founder of queer artist collective The Glitter Militia. Ra is the mother of the House of Slé ballroom house/artist collective. Club Ate have performed and exhibited at the Sydney Biennale 2020, M+ Museum, the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Australia, and more.

B. 1990, Harbin, China. Lives and works in Shanghai.

Fei Yi Ning’s film and animation work explores the relationship between humans, technology, and the environment. The Moonshore (2021) is a dreamy but unsettling excursion into a posthuman future where people rely on AI-powered devices to combat short-term memory loss induced by ocean algae. At times, the film replicates the familiar visual language of classical Chinese mythology and literature while using organic shapes and microscopic slides to create a hallucinatory narrative about an uncertain future. Here, the AI caregiver is portrayed as an “aging priestess” in charge of memory.

Fei’s work has been shown at the 2022 Beijing Biennale, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, Friedman Benda in New York, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and more.

B. 1979, Gifu, Japan. Lives and works in New York.