From “Viewing Asia” to “Viewing from Asia”: Imagining Asian Futures in the VH AWARD Retrospective Exhibition
Writer: 李欣然 Xinran Li
Date: 10/05/2025
Keywords: asian / global south / AI / digital memory / diasporic / ethnic histories
Exhibition view, Image courtesy of Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
The VH AWARD Retrospective Exhibition has been on view at the Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing since March 2025. The presentation brings together five past award-winning projects alongside two shortlisted works by Chinese artists from the fifth edition, collectively forming a condensed yet multifaceted vision of Asia’s speculative futures as seen from a Global South perspective.Since its establishment in 2016, VH AWARD’s institutional framework of recognition and support has undergone a significant transformation: from an initiative primarily focused on Korean artists to a broader platform engaging new media practitioners across Asia. This shift traces a trajectory from a “local narrative” toward an “Asian narrative,” reflecting the award’s evolving engagement with the question of how Asia imagines—and constructs—its own futures.
Exhibition view, Image courtesy of Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
此次《VH AWARD历届获奖作品展》就像一个切片，记录了从“观看亚洲”转向“由亚洲观看”过程里的不同阶段。当“亚洲”越来越被用来代表某种未来时, 这七件作品跨越AI、数字记忆、族裔历史与时间连续体的边界，借由影像展开提问：一场关于“亚洲如何观看未来”的艺术探讨具体应该是什么样子？
As Asia’s discursive position within the geopolitical landscape of contemporary art continues to rise, “Asia” can no longer be understood merely as a geographic designation. It increasingly operates as a site of cultural imagination aligned with the reactivation of the “Global South”—a political term that originally emerged during the Cold War to describe alliances among developing nations, and which has since been rearticulated within cultural and artistic discourse as a critical entry point into debates around decentralization and de-Westernization within the global art ecosystem. When artistic practices drawing upon “Asian spirituality,” “ethnic identity,” or “non-Western cultural memory” participate in constructing visions of the future, they inevitably generate a global recalibration of the question: who has the authority to narrate? In this shift, Asia transitions from being the object of observation to an active agent of perception. “Viewing Asia” is rewritten as “viewing from Asia.” The question that follows is therefore not simply how Asia is represented within a global framework, but how the future might be apprehended through an Asian epistemological and aesthetic lens.
The VH AWARD Retrospective Exhibition may be understood as a cross-sectional archive of this transition—from “watching Asia” to “watching from Asia.” As “Asia” increasingly becomes a signifier for speculative futures, the seven works presented in the exhibition traverse the boundaries of AI, digital memory, diasporic and ethnic histories, and temporal continuities. Through moving-image practices, they pose a fundamental inquiry: what might an artistic investigation into “how Asia envisions the future” concretely entail?
Exhibition view, Image courtesy of Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
Upon entering the exhibition space, the first work encountered is Xu Dongzhu’s A Thousand Horizons, the Third VH AWARD Grand Prize–winning project. Through a deliberate blurring of boundaries, the work subtly destabilizes viewer expectations. By deconstructing both textual and medial logics, it stages an experimental inquiry into an “Asian mode of seeing,” emblematic of the transitional ambiguity between “viewing Asia” and “viewing from Asia.”
Structured through a horizontally flipping rhythm of moving images, the work unfolds as an abstract succession of a thousand horizons: pink dawns, orange dusk light, golden noon radiance, and snow-covered grasslands. Color operates as both structure and affect—its continuous shifts producing sharp contrasts and chromatic collisions that draw the viewer into a perpetually transforming visual field. The recurring emergence of a red sun becomes a focal motif, insistently luminous; amid neon-like primary colors, the viewer’s gaze is gradually absorbed into a quasi-hypnotic, meditative state.
Xu Dongju, A Thousand Skies, 2019, single-channel video, 8 min 10 sec. Image courtesy of the artist and Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing.
Exhibition view, Image courtesy of Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
As recipients of the First and Second VH AWARD Grand Prizes respectively, Je Baak and Kim Hyung-kyu situate their works within “Korean” identity as a spatio-temporal grounding, mobilizing national geography, historical memory, and embodied perception to articulate what may be understood as an early phase of “viewing Asia.” Their projects register a moment in which Asia remains both subject and object of representation, mediated through localized narratives and sensorial frameworks.Je Baak’s Journey (2016) constructs a form of self-travel within a non-physical space, composed of a constellation of floating visual symbols. The work reflects upon South Korea’s process of digital transformation as a spiritual negotiation—a mode of self-alignment within technological acceleration. This can be described as a “soft” modality of Asian viewing, wherein futurity is abstracted into a landscape of interiority, a cartography of the mind. Viewers are immersed in a gravity-defying and temporally indeterminate cosmos, invited to contemplate existence through the perceptual act of “walking” within a suspended, speculative universe.
Je Baak, The Passage, 2015, 3D RPG animation, 27 min 29 sec, looped. Image courtesy of the artist and Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing.
Exhibition view, Image courtesy of Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
In resonance with this approach, Kim Hyung-kyu’s Listening to the Wind (Crossing) transforms geopolitical borders into pathways of cinematic traversal. As the work moves across multiple historical and geographical sites within Korea, viewers are positioned within a dynamic oscillation between passive spectatorship and active scrutiny. They are invited to assume the role of a seemingly “neutral observer,” navigating layered terrains of memory, territory, and political inscription. Both Je Baak and Kim Hyung-kyu mobilize technological media to construct what might be described as a static and ostensibly neutral gaze. Within these frameworks, Asia emerges as an object to be viewed, interpreted, and extracted for meaning. This mode of representation—characteristic of the early discursive context of the VH AWARD—reflects a logic of vision structured by external projection. Asia, in this phase, remains something to be looked at, rather than a vantage point from which to look.
Kim Hyung-kyu, Listening to the Wind_Transit, 2016, single-channel video, 8 min 07 sec. Image courtesy of the artist and Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
A decisive turning point emerges with Lu Minglong’s Black Cloud (2021), a work that critically responds to the technologically mediated fantasy of a “spiritual Asia” circulating within global discourse and, in doing so, inaugurates a shift toward a perspective of “viewing from Asia.” Structured through a slow and contemplative rhythm that evokes meditative temporalities often associated with East Asian aesthetic traditions, the work envisions a technologically driven Asian futurity. Yet within this speculative landscape, artificial intelligence does not function as an omnipotent agent; rather, it appears as a constrained entity—self-reflective, suspended within algorithmic systems, and caught between surveillance and freedom, attachment and void. AI becomes not merely an object of observation but a subject capable of reflexive vision, turning its gaze upon itself. Through this reversal—from AI as the “seen” to AI as a self-observing subject—Black Cloud constructs a philosophically inflected reconfiguration of human–machine relations. The work marks the emergence of a distinctly situated mode of seeing: soft in its temporality, extended in its duration, introspective in tone, and underwritten by a subtle yet persistent skepticism. It is not only a meditation on technologically driven futures, but also a deliberate repositioning—an active claiming of the right to envision and articulate the future from within an Asian epistemic framework.
Lawrence Lek, Black Cloud, 2021, single-channel video, 11 min. Image courtesy of the artist and Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
In Subash Thebe Limbu’s Ladamba Tayem; Future Continuous, the eighteenth-century Limbu warrior and the time-traveling figure from the future operate as symbolic counterparts: one embodying histories of colonial resistance, the other articulating a desire for self-naming and futurity. Together, they construct a nonlinear and non-Western conception of time—one in which the future is not a predetermined destination but a continuum co-authored by ancestors and descendants. As Sarah Pink and others argue in Digital Ethnography (2016), digital media are not merely instruments of observation but platforms through which communities actively reimagine their cultures and futures. In Limbu’s work, digital moving image becomes precisely such a “field site of the future.” Yakthung (Limbu) language, ritual gesture, and traditional attire form the material of narrative construction, transforming Indigenous culture from a museological relic into an emergent, future-oriented epistemology. By confronting and unsettling Western techno-futurist narratives that marginalize Indigenous presence, the work reassigns the category of “the future” to those historically deprived of narrative authority. It exemplifies a genuinely situated mode of “viewing from Asia.”
Subash Thebe Limbu, Ladamba Tayem; The Ongoing Future, 2023, single-channel video, 14 min 51 sec. Image courtesy of the artist and Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
In zzyw’s Peach Blossom Spring, “viewing from Asia” manifests as a culturally inflected resistance to the internal logics of digital governance. Drawing inspiration from the classical Chinese fable The Peach Blossom Spring, the work fuses technological critique with speculative imagination to propose a nonlinear and non-instrumental trajectory of technological practice. At its core lies the “universal network observer,” an omniscient computational system embodying dominant paradigms of efficiency, transparency, and frictionless data circulation—an all-encompassing “uno” in which every datum is stored. In contrast, “Peach Blossom Spring” functions as an algorithmically concealed site of deviation, an instance of what might be termed “Heretic Computing”—a dissident counter-model to mainstream technological aesthetics. Viewers, positioned as voyeuristic “bugs” within the system, are guided through a philosophical journey within informational opacity. If technology cannot be neutral, the work asks, might it be possible to invent a language of technology that is culturally situated—one that emerges from within rather than being imposed from without?
zzyw, Peach Blossom Spring, 2023, single-channel video, 12 min 34 sec. Image courtesy of the artist and Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
In He Zike’s Glitch City, “viewing from Asia” unfolds through a first-person narrative of digital-era memory. Set in the aftermath of a catastrophic failure at a central urban data center, the film follows an encounter between a systems administrator and a retired taxi driver, pseudonymously named “Hongyan” (Wild Goose), as they traverse the fog of a destabilized digital world. The name evokes both migratory directionality and data transmission—at once a bird in flight and a packet of information circulating between cloud and ground. The setting of “Cloud Guizhou” transforms a specific geography into a perceptual terrain where technology and memory converge. Here, the “cloud” operates as both meteorological phenomenon and network metaphor: soft, shifting, intangible, yet determinative of orientation and belonging. He renders “cloud memory” as an affective technological apparatus, using the metaphor of navigational failure within the cloud to articulate contemporary experiences of drift within algorithmic regimes. This, too, exemplifies “viewing from Asia”: not by positioning Asia as thematic backdrop, but by mobilizing lived realities and perceptual frameworks rooted in Asian contexts to interrogate the structures of digital modernity itself.
He Zike, Glitch City, 2023, single-channel video, 14 min 20 sec. Image courtesy of the artist and Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing
From the early phase of “watching Asia” to the contemporary multiplicity of “viewing from Asia,” these seven works collectively articulate divergent yet interrelated articulations of Asian experience. Together, they form a multidirectional inquiry into how Asia might envision and narrate its own futures. Yet numerous questions remain unresolved: how might “non-urban” Asian imaginaries be represented? How might gendered and queer subjectivities be foregrounded? How might labor and embodied experience enter more fully into the discourse? These under-articulated dimensions await further participation in the ongoing conversation around “Asian futures.” Perhaps each viewer is called to reconsider their own position: how to move beyond being merely observed, and instead to reorient perception—within a global framework—so as to see the world, and oneself, from within an Asian epistemic horizon.
Exhibition view, Image courtesy of Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing