do i have the patience to unpack all of this? not before my meds kick in https://twitter.com/glassemusic/status/1280697172770451456

it's not "our cultures" when sinofuturism is an aesthetic indentured by western imagination, once removed from the orientalisms of earlier generations that were partially informed by geopolitical development and partially distorted by the West's proximity to Asia.

okay okay:

hanja used in korea since gojoseon era.

pre-meiji japan borrowed chinese words, made up new meanings

chinese language was "standardized" in 1930 by ROC

two iterations of china, two iterations of chinese (traditional/simplified), multiple dialects and grammars

so-called "oriental" design elements have been commodified, exchanged, and remixed in perpetuity across regions, and its template has also been reframed across different asian cultures (including turkic, arab, persian, kazakh, uyghur, siamese, etc.) from a western lens

as diasporic asians our understanding of culture is inextricably aligned to the western lens, our identities flattened to some dichotomy of "east meets west" while the call for reclamation and re-appropriation of design elements merely parrots brown/black/indigenous struggles.

vaporwave-derivative aesthetics are cringey but they are not a problem because they make no attempts to claim asian identity; the reflexive association to asian identity is a problem, and claiming such aesthetics as asian is a problem.