Urban Culture

‘It’s about the Buddha, yo. Hey brother, listen carefully! You got it? No? You don’t? Okay, baby, no problem.’This hip-hop excerpt is just a small taste of a new wave of Japanese Buddhism that is becoming increasingly popular, at least according to a

In the week leading up to Valentine’s Day in Japan, there was a steady flow among the major cities’ females. First they hit up grocery store baking isles in droves, and then moved on to craft shop gift-wrapping sections. Later they dispersed graceful

Want to be cool in China? Try taking on some family values. According to an article published Monday in BusinessWeek, ‘Reckoning with Chinese Gen Y,’ while younger generations in the country (aged roughly between 15 and 30) are becoming more ‘modern,

Can India be great? That’s a question covered by Sumit Ganguly in our new special feature site,APAC 2020: The Decade Ahead, which has been receiving some excellent feedback thus far–thank you.  Lately, I’ve begun asking myself the same question

Will Hong Kong and its northern neighbour Shenzhen join forces to become the world’s third largest metropolis by 2020? Asia Tatler sheds light on the possibility of this in its current feature (‘Urban Fusion’) and includes some pretty informative bac

The Hong Kong art scene has been in the news a lot this year–apparently flourishing despite the global economic downturn. The buzz peaked with last month’s five-day long Christie’s International’s auction, which was held in the Asian metropolis and

Yesterday I talked about the graffiti movement in Kazakhstan (‘Culture on a Wall’) and its connection to other aspects of the country’s society, including national identity, mainstream pop culture and even art anthropology. So I was pleased to hear t

‘What’s going on in Kazakhstan?’ A passing thought I had recently has led me to discover a few truly amazing things happening in the Central Asian contemporary arts and culture scene. First, I came across a unique and fascinating series of projects

As planning for a Shanghai Disneyland surges forward, boosted by the recent go-ahead of China’s economic
planning agency, an interesting news story I came across today sheds
some light on local perspectives. A televised
protest by Sha