Asian Values
Lust, Caution
Trop Picks: The Secret Life of Trees
The trees come alive at the Indeco hotel in Tanjore.
Tomato Tomato
So you’ve just inked a deal with a hard-driving international partner. Each of you returns to HQ satisfied that you’ve negotiated the better deal.
Do You Hate Standing in Line?
Apparently, so does Minsuk Cho, Columbia University- and Rem Koolhaas- trained starchitect helming the firm Mass Studies.
When You're a Stranger in Your Own Home
The home decor in director Satyajit Ray's movie Charulata is a perfect metaphor for the identity crisis of India's bourgeoisie.
Musicians Without Borders
Who could have imagined that political machinations from the height of the Cold War would reverberate on Youtube fifty years later?
Won't Someone Claim Us?
Questions of identity in an increasingly globalized, confusing world are foremost on the minds of young Asian filmmakers.
Too Much Is Never Enough
The relatively understated Chinese objet d'art had to bejewel itself to meet the tastes of customers in the Mughal and Persian markets.
The Pink Portent
What is Balinese Hinduism?
There are two Balis: “Bali,” the seeker’s paradise of the Eat, Pray, Love set, and the other Bali, a less penetrable, more complex place. “Bali” was born out of the other Bali’s dialogues with European orientalists and the Indonesian state.
Trop Picks: Carl Linnaeus
Where are all the non-Western artists in the global marketplace of ideas?
The Intimate Enemy
Alain Soldeville’s photos of the transgender community in Singapore in the 1980s are startlingly intimate.
Burmese Box
The material an artist choses to work with reveals much about the way she views herself. Take this nineteenth century box from what was then Burma, for example:
2 Photographers, 2 Philosophies
The photo series Longing by Prabuddha Dasgupta (1956-2012) is, in his own words, an “ongoing personal journal of memory and
What is Modern Art in the Asian Context?
Summarizing the development of art in the West, the artist Chen Hengke (1876-1923) described Western painting as typically faithful to forms
A New (Old) Kind of Glocal
Whatever happened to “Glocal”? An amalgam of the words “global” and “local,” it was the corporate buzzword of the late Nineties.
Trop Picks: Venkai and Valli
The Eternal Outsider
What is the point at which the foreign becomes local? This is a question we might ask ourselves as we view the artistic creations of immigrants who express themselves through the idiom of their adopted land.
Is the Cheongsam Really the Chinese National Dress?
Why do Chinese fashionistas eschew the cheongsam?