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, this video recontextualizes these depictions to explore the construction of diasporic identity.