Tired of The Future: Techno-Orientalism and the Trappings of Speculative World Building
by Liang Luscombe
Mr Kim in The Fifth Element (1997)
When I was ten years old, my dad (a giant science fiction nerd) told me that sci-fi held all genres within it—romance, action, mystery, non-fiction—and that one probably didn’t need to read or watch anything else. In many ways, I still agree with him. Growing up, The Fifth Element (1997) was one of my favourite movies. Whether it was the busted up flying taxi Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis) begrudgingly drives, Diva Plavalaguna's operatic performance on the intergalactic cruise ship or the wildly space-age and now iconic costumes by Jean Paul Gaultier, I loved it all.
Across these grand futuristic visions, there is one rather small scene in The Fifth Element that my sister and I particularly delighted in reciting—a scene that has been on my mind since working on my own sci-fi short film, Malamadre (2022). Early in The Fifth Element, we see Korben Dallas receiving mail while eating lunch made by Mr Kim, the owner of the flying siu mei hawker store that pulls up out the front of Dallas’s house. The scene culminates in Mr Kim losing a bet with Korben that the message in his mail is good news. It isn’t. Korben has in fact been fired by the taxi company he works for, and upon opening his mail, Mr Kim exclaims, “You are fired!”
Upon viewing the film again more recently, the appearance of Mr Kim and his hawker store gave me an uneasy itch. While undeniably endearing and cheeky, Mr Kim visibly drips with cartoonish Oriental signifiers: his excellent banter is in broken English; he leaves the scene in a flying hawker store (placing him squarely in an imagined futurity) replete with red paper lanterns, Cantonese roast ducks hanging from its rafters. The scene closes with Mr Kim throwing a bag of fortune cookies to Korben for good luck.
As a child, I relished seeing the accoutrements of East Asian culture on screen; the future, in these brief scenes, wasn't White (or at least not wholly White). But having revisited the scene in later years, Mr Kim felt more like a humorous prop for this future world than a citizen of it (who could relate to real world problems like getting fired). Instead, Mr Kim plays the role of racialised scenery for the technologised city—scenery for the building of an Asian-inspired vision of the future.
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The cityscapes of Blade Runner 2049 (2017)
Emerging in the mid-1990s, the concept of techno-Orientalism updates Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism (1978). It traces a trend that's crept into all sorts of Western cultural production, including (of course) my dad’s beloved sci-fi. In the wake of imperial aspirations and consumerist desires, techno-Orientalism describes the West’s imagining of (and anxieties about) East Asia and East Asians, fetishising the East’s perceived technological advancement while further entrenching the West as the architect of both present and future narratives.
As David Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta Niu write in ‘Technologizing Orientalism’— ‘Whereas Orientalism, as a strategy of representational containment, arrests Asia in traditional, and often premodern imagery, techno-Orientalism presents a broader, dynamic and more contradictory spectrum of images, constructed by the West and East alike, of an “Orient” undergoing rapid economic and cultural transformations.’¹ Why does the filmic future so frequently appear as a fusion of East Asian cities such Tokyo, Hong Kong or Shanghai—but devoid of agentic Asians?
One only needs to view the cityscapes of Blade Runner 2049 (Villeneuve, 2017) to see the way kanji neon signs, noodle bars and giant holograms of women in anime-inspired costumes are used to create an exotic techno world. This rather flimsy backdrop quality is typified by techno-Orientalism’s mediated nature; as Masanori Oda describes, “there may be contact between the both parties, but there is never an encounter, much less an uncanny experience.”² Indeed, what is presented to us in these films is an Asia-ness which is only superficially referenced as a mediated aesthetic. For instance, in a scene from The Matrix (1999), main character Neo has martial arts forms such as Jiu-Jitsu, Kenpō, Tae Kwon Do and drunken boxing uploaded to his brain. Upon awakening from the upload, he hilariously declares, ‘I know Kung Fu.’ Here, the film reduces complex and quite different martial arts into a simplified Hollywood derivative that can be used at will.³
Major in Ghost in the Shell (2017)
Elsewhere, literary scholar and cultural theorist Ann Anlin Cheng elaborates on techno-Orientalism by pushing against the idea that the figure of the cyborg is only a development of modern technology and corporate culture. Utilising her own concept of ornamentalism, she argues that the cyborg is also indebted to Western constructions of Asiatic femininity, which is seen as synthetic and excessively ornamental: ‘she can be invoked by the swirl of silk, the cool stillness of porcelain. She is so suffused with [Orientalist] representation, that she has become invisible.’⁴ These objects, imagery and patterning in Western art and culture come thick and fast: the exotic calligraphy as decorations in numerous Art Nouveau paintings to in more recent times the donning of kimonos and vague Asian stylings by pop stars from Katy Perry to Nicki Minaj. But how does this then make the Asian femme a precursor to the cyborg? Cheng argues it is the conflation of her personhood with these objects—which have become her stand-ins—that eerily aligns her with the cyborg: a figure also indistinguishable between human and object.⁵
Cheng locates this conflation in the Hollywood remake of the Japanese anime film Ghost in the Shell (Sanders, 2017). It’s the story of a cyborg policewoman named Major (played by Scarlett Johansson) created by housing a Japanese woman’s mind, Motoko Kusanagi, in the artificial body of a cyborg (Johansson). With Kusanagi's brain 'wiped' of her past life, she is reactivated in this new White body. Over the course of the film, we constantly witness a deep anxiety about this conflation of human and object/inhuman/machine. What is it that makes Major human? Cheng argues that this is ornamentalism, in which the ‘real’ Asian femme, Kasanagi, exists as artificial, an object as her stand-in and largely out of sight, inside the White machine: a cyborg that serves only the military, let alone herself. Over and over again we return to the Major’s smooth, synthetic and impenetrable skin which transforms as needed for the military missions asked of her. Its appearance is patched and fragmented, holding the history of the horror she continually experiences as a toy of military exercises. Major’s skin reflects how Asiatic femininity is ‘the laboring raced body underneath the slave logic of the cyborg.’⁶ It is here that we find a more embodied and horror-filled reading of the Asian femme’s positioning within Hollywood’s construction of futurity.
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Some monstrousness in my own film, Malamadre (2022)
So why can’t Hollywood imagine a future that does not rely on the tired tropes of techno-Orientalism, with its nasty window dressing and pseudo-Asian urbanity? Does the framework of techno-Orientalism go far enough to challenge our understanding of how technology and racial objectification functions?
The danger is that the concept fails to deliver a more potent critique, and only speaks to the visual aesthetics and veneer of imperialism. How then do we as image-makers contend with the bind that Orientalism presents; does moving image work that continues to reveal and unpack the flimsiness of techno-Orientalism’s representations instead only centre, again, the occidental gaze? Or is outright rejection the strategy of choice, in hopes that such representations will simply recede into Hollywood’s rearview mirror?
I love seeing post-Orientalist time loops, temporal trajectories and unknown futures that provoke a more embodied and more monstrous experience that springs forth from Asian characters fully inhabiting worlds created in their image. Monstrousness goes against the confines of the ‘well-behaved’ model minority stereotype of the East Asian. Instead, it explores and combines the markers of excess of the feminine grotesque, and abjection, as a feminist strategy to transgress the confines of the construction of femininity and the raced subjecthood more broadly. In my own work, monstrousness has been rich territory. Malamadre is a work about a strange matriarchal alien world of asexual reproduction, where mothers feed on their young and deconstructed puppets with many limbs and heads have symbiotic relations with their human hosts.
Fran’s forced maternal relationship in Malamadre (2022)
The film opens with a sleepy and sickly Fran, our East Asian femme protagonist, who demands her assigned alien, Alice stop entering her to feed while she is asleep. From Fran’s addiction to eating alien eggs to her desire to strangle her ‘baby’ Alice, I blend highly visual and deliberately over-the-top signifiers of 'monstrousness’ with real-world details of the women in my life—such as the maternal experience of being ‘touched out’ by your own children, or my mother’s legendary tai chi classes in the small South Australian town of Wallaroo. The binding of the puppet Alice with her human counterpart Fran becomes a tool to playfully explore the body horror of a fully subjective Asian femme character. Here, I place the comically anecdotal—stories such as mum’s tai chi classes, rich in cultural specificity—alongside the visual language of body horror so that the humanity of these subjects is made undeniable, uncomfortably so, by abjection.
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My itch continues. I'm interested in what a DIY approach can do to cut through techno-Orientalist’s deceptively hi-fi but conceptually flimsy production. At the centre of Malamadre’s capricious energy is the knowing visual pleasure produced by repurposing science fiction’s tropes in a DIY manner using papier-mâché, cardboard and foam, from the 1960s styling of the space decor, the emphasis on silver chrome finishing and a natural world whose properties on another planet can be turned upside down. Malamadre plays with this at every turn: Fran’s space jumpsuit is very obviously silver fabric often used for kids calisthenics' costumes; the space-age tunnel is a painted backdrop; and I quite literally pump blue food colouring through a hose to show the symbiotic relations between human and alien characters. In Malamadre, DIY world-building is stacked to the point that the exotically technologised and highly artificial world that we often see in Hollywood sci-fi films is warped into something that is conscious of its own construction. It is in this reconstruction and reconfiguration of known parts that we may find an opening for a more materially-driven post-Orientalist critique.
While writing this text, I message my sister: ‘I have been thinking about that scene we loved in The Fifth Element.’ ‘That whole movie is amazing, hahaha’ she replies. ‘But I was thinking about that scene where the hawker stall guy tells Bruce Willis he is fired.’ I type back, ‘The one where he is talking on the boat—yeah, I didn’t realise how two-dimensional he was.’ ‘True, but he does say “ai ya”’ she jokes, referring to the Singaporean slang that Mr Kim and our family throw into their phrases when someone has screwed up. I smile; my sister had found the small grain of humorous authenticity within the synthetic surface of the film. 🪞
works cited
David Roh, Betsy Huang and Greta Niu, ‘Technologizing Orientalism’ in Techno-Orientalism: Imagining Asia in Speculative Fiction, History, and Media, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015) 2.
Masanori Oda, ‘Welcoming the Livido of the Technoids Who Haunt the Junkyard of the Techno-Orient’ in The Uncanny: Experiments in Cyborg Culture (ed. Bruce Grenville), (Vancouver: Arsenal Pub Press, 2002) 250.
Jerrine Tan, ‘Orientalism in Our Code: ‘The Matrix Resurrections,” Hollywood, and Anti-Asian Violence’, Los Angeles Review of Books, 2022.
Anne Alin Cheng, ‘Monsters, Cyborgs, and Vases: Apparitions of the Yellow Woman’, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, September 22 2021.
Cheng.
Cheng.
Liang Luscombe’s practice encompasses painting, sculpture and moving image that engages in a process of questioning how images and film affect audiences. She received her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Her work has been included in screenings at ACMI, Composite, Liquid Architecture (Melbourne); Vehicle, (NYC); Table, OpenTV, Comfort Station (Chicago). She has undertaken residencies at Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Chicago Artist Coalition’s HATCH residency program, and SOMA Summer in Mexico City, among others.