Beyond Time and Sex: An Opsis of Queer Sci-Fi in Asia and Phantas.ma/polis. Archive and Research Projects in partnership with the 2021 Asian Art Biennial

The SEA plateaus started its collaboration with the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in the 7th edition of the Asian Art Biennial in 2019. In the 2021 edition entitled Phantasmapolis, the two organisations planned two archive and research projects focusing on queer sci-fi and futurism in Asia.

In the project on queer sci-fi, Wang I-Chun assembled research materials from visual arts, theatre, literature, and motion pictures which helped her to compare Taiwanese queer sci-fi with those from other countries in Asia. For Wang, these materials served to constitute the Asian imagination about the queer future in historical and geographical dimensions. In addition to sharing her ideas in the form of art documentation, Wang’s research was also given in a forum in the Biennial as well as in a roundtable in the annual conference of the Taiwan Society of Anthropology and Ethnology.    

The second collaboration, Look back to the Future, was directed by Ye Ren-Yu and partnered with a video project curated by Anushka Rajendran, who invited 15 audiovisual artists to participate in this project in digital media. With Rajendran’s curatorial arrangements, these artists had an opportunity to work with Pad.ma (https://pad.ma).  Started in 2007, Pad.ma is a collaboration of CAMP, Majlis, and Point of View from Mumbai, 0x2620 from Berlin, and the Alternative Law Forum from Bangalore. As Pad.ma is a pioneer championing radical approach to manage digital archives, the participation of this artist-run project in the biennial greatly encouraged heterogeneous ways of receiving, interpreting, and producing moving visual media. With the contributions of two Taiwanese cultural critics, Yang Yu-Chiao and Chen Wang-Yin, these new works were enriched and implemented by time-based annotations, timeline views, and editing features. As a result of advancing technologies in communication, art creations were conducted continually in the organic and spontaneous discussions across the physical borders. 

The online platform that hosts this exhibition conceptualized and drawn from Pad.ma proposes alternative ways of deepening the connectivity and democratic possibilities that can exist vis-à-vis the internet towards ethical digital infrastructures to engage intimately with art.