An Asian Ghost Story is a film and installation piece by artist Bo Wang. It is a meditation on the spectral traces of Asia’s late-20th-century modernization, told through the unlikely medium of wigs and the global hair trade. Beginning with the 1965 U.S. embargo on “Asiatic hair”— later rebranded as “communist hair”— the film exposes how racialized and politicized categories reshaped the flows of capital, labor, and culture during the Cold War. Hair, as both intimate body matter and industrial commodity, becomes a haunting archive of imperial entanglements: Mao’s China as the largest supplier, Hong Kong as a liminal gateway, and South Korea and Japan as beneficiaries of U.S.– aligned industrial expansion. By tracing this history, the work reanimates the ghostly presences embedded in everyday commodities, revealing how seemingly banal objects conceal legacies of migration, displacement, and geopolitical power. In reframing wigs as vessels of memory and haunting, the film situates Hong Kong as a transient mediator between competing worlds and compels us to confront the entanglement of U.S. imperialism, Asian economic transformation, and the intimate materiality of diaspora.

Bo Wang (b. 1982, Chongqing, China) is an artist, filmmaker and researcher currently based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

— SG

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