Yellow Peril

Title: Yellow Peril
Production Year: 2023
Runtime: 6min 53sec
Director: Ho Bin Kim



The "Yellow Peril" exhibition is a visual representation of a satirical short story written by the artist to depict how absurd Asian Hate and other forms of racism in America are. The artist has written this story at the height of the pandemic when Asians were unfairly targeted. The terminology, Yellow Peril, historically refers to Western fears that Asians, in particular the Chinese, would invade their lands and disrupt Western values, such as democracy, Christianity, and technological innovations. The artist decides to use this exact derogatory term to draw attention to the absurd myth of reverse racism in America where a belief that the social and economic gains by non-white people in America and elsewhere causes disadvantages for the white people. Based on this false ideology, the artist writes a fictional story where this absurd belief is the reality, set in San Francisco in 1880, which deals with 4 Asian American characters sitting around the mahjong table and discussing how to overthrow America. 

Inspired by the Balenciaga commercial generated by AI technology, the artist uses AI generative(ChatGPT, Midjourney, D-id, and Hey-Gen) tools to display his literature. 

Through this digital storytelling, the artist wants to warn about the dangers of media where the stories told in it are usually filtered and have underlying propaganda attached to them. The artist’s original story is way crueler in depicting Asian Hate, but since ChatGPT does not allow any hate words or sensitive topics to be inputted, the artist had to take out much of its crucial content from the original story, thus ultimately creating a safe story that cannot make anyone uncomfortable. However, the artist has originally written this story to make people uncomfortable and the very people who should feel uncomfortable are people of privilege and ignorance.