New Emissary

Indian Cinema Series  As promised yesterday, here’s the first in our Indian cinema spotlight series. I’m starting off with a countdown of some of the country’s most beautiful and talented leading ladies, based on the latest buzz. Our pick for to

This week I mentioned the (supposed) Singapore vs. Hong Kong art war, with the two metropolises said to be vying for top city status through the development of world-class arts and culture scenes.  Well, judging from a wine industry update I rec

I was passed this by our editor who assured me the headline wasn’t unnecessarily sensationalist, but actually a good read for anyone interested in the Asian art world. ’Art Wars: Hong Kong vs. Singapore’ in The Wall Street Journal says categoric

I mentioned last week that we could look forward to an exclusive peek into Tokyo Designers Week from Wallpaper* magazine’s Japan correspondent, Gordon Kanki Knight. And despite feeling slightly under-the-weather–likely from all of the running about-

Indian Cinema SeriesThis spring, I met with Vikas Swarup, the charming Indian author and diplomat whose book Q&A hit movie Slumdog Millionaire was based on. The huge success of that film had many heads turning in India’s direction this year, but

As a prelude to highlighting Indian cinema later this week, I thought it would be fitting to hear more from Chris Morton, whose captivating portrait shots of Indian people I featured here last week. I asked Chris some questions about the inspiration

The King of Pop’s post-mortem reign over the world continues. On Wednesday, This Is It, the Michael Jackson part-documentary part-concert movie debuted internationally. And the film, which chronicles the ill-fated star between April and June 2009, gr

The design spotlight is currently on Japan’s capital city.  Tokyo Designers Week 2009 starts this weekend with a flourish of events and parties scattered around the metropolis. Last year, I was lucky enough to go to one of the exclusive after-pa

This time last year, Slumdog Millionaire had only been shown at select venues in North America, but was already creating buzz as something potentially very big. And the movie certainly lived up to expectations–it was a global hit, winning numerous i

The ‘Pixar: 20 Years of Animation’ exhibit in Taipei is wrapping up this week. Personally, I can’t believe Pixar has already been around so long–it’s already 15 years since the company entered the mainstream cinematic consciousness with Toy Story. T

Agus Purnomo, considered a rising young star in Indonesia’s abstract art scene, is going international–including to Tokyo, where his work is currently on display. His accolades already include the Nokia Art Award, the Jakarta Art Award in 2007 and b

It was the striking picture of Mao Tse-Tung–with ‘slashes’ of black paint across his face–that caught my eye as I was perusing the CS Monitor this morning. And I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the image is actually from the cover of the