alternative technological futures from asian artists
✮⋆˙ Natasha Tontey ✮⋆˙ Kent Chan ✮⋆˙ Charmaine Poh ✮⋆˙ Im Youngzoo ✮⋆˙
Walking through a mall parking lot in Kuala Lumpur, one might unexpectedly encounter a small shrine dedicated to Datuk Gong, a local guardian spirit that blends elements of Chinese land deity worship with Malay animistic beliefs. As I step out of my car, I pause for a moment at the shrine with a silent nod and my hands in a prayer gesture, acknowledging the presence of spiritual forces, whether or not I am certain of their existence. Later, at home, I replace a bowl of fruit on the altar of my grandparents’ memorial tablets. These small acts of devotion, effortlessly woven into daily life, reflect a worldview rooted in ancestral reverence and spiritual continuity—a perspective that coexists alongside modern technological life.
This experience is not unique to me or to Malaysia. Across Asia and many parts of the non-Western world, spiritual practices and technology are not seen as opposites but are threads in a layered cosmology—where the material and immaterial interlace, time is flows non-linearly, and the future is entangled with the past and the present. Animism, which persists in the margins of modern societies, can be understood as a form of ecological respect—decentering human domination by recognising the vitality of plants, animals, and even stones not as resources to be exploited but as active participants in an interconnected ecology. In this context, technology is not merely a tool to be mastered but something that exists alongside, perhaps even intertwined with other dimensions of existence–whether spiritual, ancestral, or ecological.
The dominant discourse of technology however has long been shaped by a Western-centric trajectory of modernity, one that equates technological advancement with industrialisation, efficiency, and digital abstraction. As noted in World Records Journal (Vol. 7), colonialism reinforced this narrow vision through the construction the ‘Stone Age’ myth–the idea that certain societies were ‘primitive’ and technologically stagnant, denying the existence of non-Western innovations and reserving the term ‘technology’ solely for tools of Western invention. This limited definition has been widely contested, with artists, scholars, and practitioners advocating and imagining more diverse understandings of what constitutes technology.
During my residency in MMCA Changdong, I continued exploring how Asian artists are creating new narratives through the lens of technodiversity, a concept developed by Yuk Hui. Hui challenges the idea of a universal technological trajectory, arguing instead for engagement with alternative epistemologies, non-modern ontologies, and locally situated technological imaginaries–recognising the diverse ways in which different cultures conceive, develop, and experience technology.
This essay extends the discussion from my residency seminar, Future Ancestors which examining how Natasha Tontey’s The Epoch of Mapalucene, Kent Chan’s Warm Fronts, Charmaine Poh’s YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE and Im Youngzoo’s Mi Ryeon each manifest technodiversity in distinct ways (the seminar included presentations by Im and Poh).
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Natasha Tontey, The Epoch of Mapalucene
Indigenous Knowledge and Non-Modern Aesthetics
In The Epoch of Mapalucene, Natasha Tontey envisions a speculative future shaped by the Minahasa worldview, where mutual aid and interspecies solidarity define a new geological epoch. Presented as a video installation, the work extends Tontey’s ongoing research into Indigenous Minahasa knowledge and its relevance in imagining alternative futures.
The Minahasa people of North Sulawesi, Indonesia, have long practiced Mapalus, a gift economy rooted in volunteerism, reciprocity, and kinship with nature. In their cosmology, the first human was a woman who gave birth through a stone—an origin story that reflects the deep spiritual and material significance of stones in Minahasa culture. Commissioned by Other Futures Festival, The Epoch of Mapalucene also critiques the Western-centric bias of the Anthropocene—a concept that attributes environmental destruction to humanity as a whole, overlooking the social, political, and historical factors that differentiate colonial and capitalist industrialization from Indigenous economies.
Tontey challenges dominant narratives of progress by centering Minahasa cosmology and embracing a kitschy aesthetic that blends Indonesian soap opera, video game culture, and both digital and real-life subcultures. Bringing together animate and inanimate realms, Tontey suggests that alternative models of co-existence—grounded in care, reciprocity, and non-human agency—have always existed outside the modernist trajectory.
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Kent Chan, Warm Fronts
Technodiversity & Climate Temporalities
What if global warming leads to a future where half the world’s population resides in tropical climates? Warm Fronts is a series of transmissions from across the tropics, speculating on a radical tropical future through sound and text. Drawing from electronic music’s long-standing connection to futurism, the project began with Kent Chan inviting DJs and music producers from tropical regions—Guillerrrrmo (Brazil), Makossiri (Kenya), Kaleekarma (India), and Gabber Modus Operandi (Indonesia)—to create music sets recorded in their respective locations. These soundscapes form the foundation of Chan’s video installation, which is accompanied by a series of posters featuring microfiction by the artist, designed by Jonathan Castro Alejos.
By weaving together these sonic contributions, Warm Fronts constructs an imagined future where tropical climates become sites of connectivity and transformation. The project explores the shared histories and speculative potential of heat as both an environmental and cultural force. Chan’s work frequently engages with what he terms the “tropical imaginary,” positioning the tropics not as a space trailing behind modernity, but as a site of futurity in itself.
The work was produced with support from the Hartwig Production | Collection Grant and acceded to the Dutch state collection. Like Tontey, Chan’s work is also rooted in Yuk Hui’s critique of universalist time by resisting Eurocentric “progress” narratives and engaging with the heat of the Global South as an aesthetic and epistemic condition. For Chan, “the tropics is already future; the future is heat.”
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Charmaine Poh, YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE
Digital Embodied Futures
YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE is a series that harnesses AI to challenge the patriarchal gaze and reframe femme-presenting bodies through reparative narratives and role-playing. Drawing from her own past, Charmaine Poh uses found footage and materials from her time as a preteen TV actor in early 2000s Singapore—a period shaped by an unregulated internet and the nascent spread of digital images.
In Good Morning Young Body, Poh resurrects her childhood TV character, E-Ching, through deepfake technology. The digital avatar—an eternal 12-year-old version of the artist—reclaims agency from the public gaze, scrutiny, and harassment she once endured. By collapsing time and space, the work enacts both a quiet revenge and a celebration of girlhood. Another piece in the series, bubble, is an interactive chatbot featuring E-Ching as a guide. Leading participants through a series of questions and responses, the chatbot operates on a framework of trust, access, and refusal, shifting power dynamics depending on the participant’s willingness to share vulnerabilities. In doing so, it interrogates notions of authority, intimacy, and service.
By centering youth, digital avatars, and queer embodiment, YOUNG BODY UNIVERSE reimagines human-technology relationships beyond Silicon Valley’s transhumanist ideals. Here, AI is not a tool of optimization or control but one of care and repair, engaging with the disciplining, dissent, and agency of laboring bodies—both human and digital
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Im Youngzoo, Mi Ryeon
Death as Technological Portal
Im Youngzoo is fascinated by the unseen—how humans construct beliefs around what they cannot perceive yet imagine. Her solo exhibition Mi Ryeon at Perigee Gallery delves into the unknowability of death, exploring the emotional and cultural forces that shape our understanding of the afterlife. The title, Mi Ryeon (미련), translates to “lingering attachment” or “reluctance to let go,” capturing the central tension of the work. Through a video installation, VR experience, and performance, Im weaves personal narratives with broader reflections on Korean society, where superstition, rationality, and collective memory intertwine.
She constructs an immersive space where these themes are not explained but felt. Using deceptively simple VR and installation techniques, Im recreates the experience of lying in a coffin, dissolving the mental boundary between the physical and metaphysical worlds. The journey begins in a glass room, where visitors enter alone and engage in meditative exercises while holding a stone as a motion controller. They then lie on a plinth, covered with a space blanket, as the air fills with the scent of herbs. Drifting across realms through VR, the experience blurs the lines between presence and absence, body and spirit. Mi Ryeon envisions death not as an end, but as a passage—a new beginning in another dimension.
The work resonates with Buddhist and Daoist conceptions of cyclical existence and liminality, challenging Western materialist views of death as finality. By using technology to evoke the unknowable, Im transforms VR unto a portal to the unseen, expanding the possibilities of what technology itself can represent.
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My engagement with technodiversity began when I co-curated a film program for Studium Generale 2024, an annual discursive curricular program by the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, themed Technodiversity—Beyond Datafication and Digital Colonialism. But my interest in artists imagining alternative technological futures dates back further, to 2019, when I co-curated Visual Arts and Theory at Other Futures Festival alongside founding director Brigitte van der Sande.
Encountering the practices of Natasha Tontey, Kent Chan, Charmaine Poh, and Im Youngzoo—and experiencing their artworks firsthand—has affirmed that technodiversity is not just a theoretical concept, but a lived and practiced approach to technology. Their works reveal ways of doing technology that take shape through aesthetic, material, and conceptual strategies. Alongside many other artists whose works have been formative encounters, they envision multiple technological worlds, awakening latent shimmering circuits—ones that have long existed and those yet to come.
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Notes:
- World Records Journal Vol. 7, Technological Ecologies, edited by Counter Encounters (Laura Huertas Millán, Onyeka Igwe, Rachael Rakes)
- Hui, Yuk, “Cosmotechnics as Cosmopolitics”, e-flux Journal, np. 86 (November 2017).
- Hui, Yuk, “On Technodiversity: A Conversation with Yuk Hui.”Interview by Daniel Ross. Los Angeles Review of Books, August 2019.
- Copy editing and line editing by ChatGPT 4.0
Jo Lene Ong is a curator from Malaysia working across Asia and Europe. Her practice engages with counter-colonial worldviews and aesthetic strategies. Currently she is serving as Curator of esea contemporary, the UK’s only non-profit art center dedicated to East and Southeast Asian contemporary art. Previously she was Program Advisor, 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale; Curator, Hartwig Art Production | Collection Grant; Co-curator, Other Futures Festival; Research Fellow, De Appel; and curatorial team of SUNSHOWER: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia 1980s to Now, National Art Center Tokyo and Mori Art Museum.