Ravers Are Designing a New East Asian Future
They’re sick of cyberpunk.
When Ridley Scott, director of the 1982 version of Blade Runner, was asked by the Los Angeles Times what he imagined the future would look like, his answer was, “Hong Kong on a very bad day.” When the science fiction film finally came out, you could see that Scott was serious. The setting looked exactly like a dreary, more depressing version of Hong Kong. It was always dark. You wouldn’t see anything, if not for the neon signs on skyscrapers with ads from large conglomerates, or from the blue-green glow of streetlights casting a sickly shadow on the city’s inhabitants. The city was showered in endless rain, where the high-tech and the analog collided in messy disarray. Were these scenes from a film about robots going rogue, or a day-in-the-life of an expat walking through Hong Kong during monsoon season?
Scott was not alone among his contemporaries. Mamoru Oshii, director of Ghost in the Shell (1995), said his first point of reference for a futuristic city was also Hong Kong. As some video essayists illustrate, the reason is that there is no better setting to question rising inequality, late stage capitalism, and who is left behind in our pursuit of “the future” (which science fiction does) than a city where the world’s finest hotels sit kilometers away from cage homes or where family owned noodle shops compete with Michelin-starred restaurants for customers at lunchtime (which Hong Kong is). Besides, the Hong Kong skyline has always looked a little futuristic.
As East Asian cities like Seoul, Shanghai, and Taipei developed toward the end of the millenium, they too became “cyberpunk”—places to explore humanity’s future with technology. Shanghai’s skyline is just as colorful and inviting as Hong Kong’s. South Korea’s four chaebols (family-owned conglomerates) hold an iron grip over the country in a way that makes American capitalism look like a socialist utopia. In the cyberpunk novels that followed Blade Runner, Tokyo is often the setting of choice.
“When you say the word ‘cyberpunk,’ the immediate connotation is hopelessness, depravity, despair,” says Farhana JH, a local rave poster designer from Hong Kong. “I don’t feel like that’s the vibe anymore.” Can there be another visual language that captures what it’s like to live in an East Asian city?
“I want to take cyberpunk and then make it hopeful,” Farhana says.
Event posters can tell you a lot about a city. As a design culture, posters actively evolve in response to changing tastes. And unlike traditional advertising, the marketing of an experience is more creative than commercial.
Farhana, who also goes by her artist handle “SMILEYWORLD,” has collaborated with event spaces and music collectives like Soho House, SLAP 拍, and Abyss in Hong Kong, as well as Oil club in Shenzhen. She’s here to twist the original concept of “cyberpunk” on its head, and in the process, create a new visual language for what it’s like to live in the city.
“In Hong Kong, it’s loud all the time. There’s always the beeping of the crosswalks and the traffic lights. There's always the sound of cars and people and the smells of everything,” Farhana says. “Everything’s so sharp in Hong Kong. And I feel like the sounds at a rave—they’re also piercing.”
While the dark neon glow of cyberpunk might strike some as dated, Farhana’s posters capture the real conditions of living in Hong Kong: The punching odor of sewage on the street or the shrill sound of crowds clustered into small spaces. One of her signature motifs is plenty of tangled barbed wires (called sigils) tightly meshed together but in a way that’s intentional. There’s confusion and chaos, yet still some level of control in the way that a weekend afternoon in Causeway Bay would be.
“I feel like especially with the chains and the sharp objects and the barbed wire, for example, it’s like how we feel tight: down to our jobs, our money, our hustle,” Farhana says. “And we go to a rave to break free from those things.”
Typefaces are bold, and the sharp objects are also glossy and colorful. The juxtaposition between tight, piercing objects and bright textures “essentially capture what we’re doing at a rave,” Farhana says. “We’re lightening all our burdens. We’re bringing these heavy feelings up in the air, throwing them away, and dancing them off.”
Across nightclubs in Mainland China and Taiwan, rave posters are also leaning into a similar visual identity. Posters in Shenzhen’s Oil club and Taipei’s FINAL club share the same preference for sharp objects that Farhana describes. Texture and bold typefaces are added to the already messy composition.
Rave journalist
was early to notice this back in 2024. “A new wave of underground clubs in Asia share a common vibe,” she reports in Rave New World. “[B]old one-word names styled in ALL CAPS, razor-edged post-club sounds reverberating through starkly minimalist spaces, Instagram party flyers that look like devil scratchings [emphasis mine].”What does this new visual language of bold text and sharp objects in discordant symphony amount to? It’s the post-cyberpunk politics of the East Asian city, where scarce space meets a large population. Day-to-day life puts you in constant disarray: The city is dense and the sounds are sharp and the tech is constantly evolving. “It’s either controlled chaos or uncontrolled chaos,” Farhana says. Party posters, as reflections of changing tastes, need to be just as messy.
“I think East Asia is the hub for experimentation. East Asia is so open to new tools. We have schools in China teaching AI to six year olds,” Farhana adds. “Using the latest tools is just so honored in these cultures. And I think that is the defining factor in all of these posters for these clubs, that we are just going a little crazy… we’re able to just go ham.”
“I mean, we are worried that robots are gonna take over, and everything is gonna go to shit,” Farhana says. “But there is so much hope as well in the people that we meet, in the communities that we're creating.”
