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Silkpunk

1. James Ng Art

“GAMBLING DEN CONCEPTS Inspired by the Imperial Steam & Light series. The den boss counts her earnings while the bouncer watches over the underground establishment. The Dice Bot hosts a game of "Fish-Prawn-Crab", a Chinese gambling game. He shakes the 3 dices with the clockwork contraption in his torso, while sorting coins with his mechanical limbs.”

So,...

as I was scrolling through Reddit, I came across a post on r/steampunk, which invited everyone to subscribe to a new subreddit called r/silkpunk. Furthermore it explained, that so called “Silkpunk” is a fairly new formed sub-genre to Steampunk. It immediatley catched my interest and I wanted to know what Silkpunk is.

In their reddit post, u/aiscifi explains it like that:

“Hey steamers and Gentlepersons, there is an awesome sub-genre called silkpunk that highlights fiction, style and culture from an Asian world of steampunk (and other punks).”

As the retrofuturism-freak that I am, I just had to look into this.

I gathered some examples for you, which I thought would be the most representative, first one above by James Ng Art, with a little story for the 3 people you see.

When I saw the picture I loved the overall aesthetic, the roughness, which characters reflect and automatically I had a movie going on in my mind.

But still, I wasn’t sure about the place that Silkpunk holds in society. Why making it a new sub-genre? Was Steampunk not enough? And that leads me on to the next artwork.

2. TRYLEA

出雲志 - 青阳上河图 - Along the River During the QingYang Town Fair

When I was reserching the sources for you guys, I let Google Translate translate the chinese website, the artist TRYLEA post their artwork on, which would be ZCOOL for those who are interested.

From what I understand, in the description of how their artwork developed, they state the following:

“The paintings [...] seem to be starting to move away from Izumo's fantasy background and move closer to my memory ~ Maybe this is the real Izumo in my heart.“

And furthermore:

“The semi-ancient streets left in the hometown of Shima Town in the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China are gradually being swallowed up by the high-end districts of commercial streets. Just use this as a memory of childhood town!”

With this in mind, what I think, Silkpunk definitley has a place as its own sub-genre in our society. Thinking about globalisation and the rapid change of east-asian cities, commercialization and tradition intersecting with each other, I can fully understand the wish to remember what was there for centuries.

In comparison to Steampunk, we have to look at how fast and extreme the change in Asia has been. A statistic published by www.worldbank.org shows the chinese population coming from about 660m people in 1961 (which already was approx. the double of today’s population of the USA) to around 1,393bn.

The artworks, which can be associated with Silkpunk, is a possibilty for everyone, who once in a while has to break out of the system that is linked to the fast transformation of cities. And this is where we see the Punk.

I guess I answered my questions. What about you? If not, don’t hestitate to ask.

I would like to thank you for reading and apoligize for grammar mistakes, since I’m not an native english speaker. I tried my best. :)

I hope you liked reading and I would love to discuss this topic even deeper or hear about different new sub-genres.

Don’t hesitate to comment or DM me.

#retrofuturism #steampunk #silkpunk #steampunkblog #society #philosophical #artwork #blog #Trylea #jamesngart