Video Commission Residency 2022 Screening

Warren Chan - Pixels of the Orient

Pixels of the Orient appropriates Western media depictions of East Asian for a psychedelic and comedic exploration of ahistorical East Asian aesthetics and identity.

Western film and television depicts East Asian culture through a pastiche of Chinese and Japanese symbols–often mixed with other influences from across Asia–filtered through an Orientalist lens that associates this “Asianness” with the exotic and mysterious. Stuck in a feedback loop, replicating and distorting itself endlessly in the vacuum of its fiction, this soup of vague Asian iconography ceases to have much relation to historic cultural practices.

While there is much valid criticism of these representations as othering and fetishistic, Pixels of the Orient aims not to critique but to reclaim. Presenting the appropriated images in the context of a video guide to Asian culture–with chapters dedicated to Asian scenery, the Chinatowns of the West, and Eastern cuisine, medicine, spirituality–this video recontextualizes these depictions to explore the construction of diasporic identity. By embracing the beauty, the contradictions, and the absurdities of this contrived culture, Pixels of the Orient rejects commodified notions of “authentic Asian identity” and instead seeks resonance in artifice.

The video synth effects used in Pixels of the Orient represent the agency of the audience. It posits that there is a reciprocal relationship between media and audience–that the ideologies of mass media are not absorbed uncritically, and that this media can be engaged with and reshaped on one’s own terms. And perhaps that is a defining experience for the Asian diaspora–to actively shape one’s identity through salvaging and curating what little representation can be found