November 2008
12 posts
Shepard Fairey - "Supply and Demand" Coming to ICA...
Where mainstream meets rebellion, the first solo museum show for street art mogul Shepard Fairey, entitled “Supply and Demand,” will be opening in February at the Institute of Comtemporary Art in Boston. While Fairey has undoubtedly attained market success with his Obey label and Barak Obama posters, his work is met with harsh judgment from fellow street artists and art critics alike...
Mr.: Nobody Dies
On view at the Lenmann Maupin gallery is a 35 minute film by Kaikai Kiki contributor Mr. The first film by the Japanese artist expands upon his examination of the Otaku subculture, which emerged in the 1970s and mainly consists of obsessive males whose fetishes include cuteness or kawaii, Mr. uses adolescent Japanese girls he discovered on the streets of Tokyo as the subjects for his film. ...
RedBull Crashed Ice Open Draft
As a child growing up playing ice hockey I always fantasized what it would be like if all the city streets became frozen over and the world became a giant ice rink. I dreamed how awesome it would be to take the game to another dimension: gliding through street intersections, zipping through an alleyway, and body checking anyone who got in my way through a storefront window. Thanks to the amped...
Inazuma Festival: Japan Celebrates Americana
by Kiya Babzani for Cool Hunting
Japan’s love affair with Americana is no secret. Hot rods, hamburgers and Harleys hold a special place in Japanese culture and their market for classic denim and workwear is thriving. So it’s no surprise that the global leader in dressing up like the Fonz celebrated the fourth annual Inazuma Festival this Sunday on Odaiba, an island just off the...
Insight Dopamine Campaign
The Dopamine campaign from Australian skate/surf clothing company, Insight, is an inspired collection of photography in film that is infused with imagery from counterculture art movements of the 30’s and 50’s. Shot in a grainy black and white, this is not your typical surf film as highlight reel aerials cut abruptly to surreal underwater scenes of decadence: a man in a lab coat...
Prince Of Kunqu: Jazz Meets Chinese Opera
by Louisa Lim for NPR Morning Edition
Imagine a musical cross between a 600-year-old form of Chinese opera and free-form jazz. It sounds like a clash of musical cultures, and in some ways it was.
On stage, with heavy white makeup pancaking his face, his body swathed in embroidered silken robes, Jeffrey Zhang looks every inch the traditional Chinese opera singer. So it comes as a shock when he...
Chronicles of Never Jewelry
Australian based Chronicles Of Never (a reference to Neverland) works loosely with the concept of space within space for their imaginative line of jewelry. Heavily influenced by architecture and with a fondness for industrial materials, the jewelry range includes forms that are very solid and angular. While the masculine objects are well suited for men, these objects can also provide an...
William Eggleston: Democratic Camera, Photographs...
With intense color and seemingly banal subject matter, the Whitney’s current restrospective on the work of William Eggleston serves as a foil to the Southern imagery depicted in HMA’s Road to Freedom collection.
Working in the Mississippi Delta, Eggleston was somewhat a pioneer in the realm of color photography. Thirty years ago photographs carried artistic merit if they were black...
Road to Freedom: Photographs of the Civil Rights...
Somewhat surprisingly, this 2008 summer show at the Altanta High Museum of Art was a first of its kind for any major museum: a collection showcasing the photographic history of the civil rights movement. Behind the pictures are stories of smashed equipment and journalists beaten, of activists drawn south by images, of amateurs who picked up cameras for the first time.
If you missed the exhibit,...
32 Via dei Birrai
Everyone knows that the worst part about a party is cleaning up. Waking up to a household that’s littered with PBR and Bud Light cans is enough to give anyone a headache. Thankfully, a recent renaissance is taking place in Italian breweries resulting in the same attention to quality and design that is found in the country’s more identifiable products such as wine and fast cars so you...
October 2008
16 posts
Yokai: Japanese Halloween Monsters
Halloween is a frothy foreign import in Japan, an excuse to have a party and eat sweets. Monsters, though, are a more serious matter.
Watch this video made by Blaine Harden for the Washington Post for a list of otherworldly monsters, or “Yokai,” which make Halloween in Japan an extra creepy occasion. Happy haunting!
The Muji Message
Simple, sufficient and understated, the Muji message is not so much a marketing campaign to push products, but more of an intellegent expression for how we should treat the future. Words that are just poignant as Muji design are accompanied by elegant images of Bolivian and Mongolian landscapes, urging us consumers to invest in modest beauty rather than pricey objects.
Diacritic Art and Culture
Diacritic, founded by RMIT Vietnam’s Richard Streitmatter-Tran, is a site dedicated to examining the relationship between contemporary art and its place in design, media, and language among other realms of communication from a Southeast Asian perspective. While the site is still in the developmental stages, you can still track some pretty cool happenings that are taking place in Southeast...
What are you, Jirat James Patradoon?
I was born in 1985 in Thailand and raised in Sydney, Australia on a super-diet of cartoons, comic books, and sci-fi movies.
Now I make giant candy coloured screenprints/posters you can look at and adore but cannot eat. I have always dreamt of joining the X-men, or becoming Ultraman, or Dracula, or a Lucha Libre pro wrestler. These ambitions reflect...
Nike Hindsight
Okay, maybe this has nothing to do with culture, but the Nike Hindsight glasses concept is just really effing cool. In a nutshell, Nike Hindsight are specially designed biking glasses created by Billy May with specifically tuned Fresnel lenses for keeping an eye on approaching taxis/cars/baby strollers by increasing your field of view beyond the human limit. Typically the human eye can only...
3 Shelters
Let’s face it, the economy is in shambles and you are not Bear Gryls. Here are three readily available small structures that will keep you shielded from the elements lest you end up on the street or are chased into the wilderness by angry mobs.
Micro-Compact Home (pictured above)
Inspired by the intimate scale of a Japanese tea house and the compact efficiency of a smart-car, students...
Eco Transparent Surfboard
The Transparent Surfboard by Atelier Yanagi can open a new ‘green’ arena for sports equipment. The ace-maker of sport equipments is working on a surfboard made out of 100 % recyclable material (PET & Balsa-wood structured hybrid) with no compromise on performance and safety. With the entire design industry seemingly hellbent on eco-friendly products, it’s nice to see one that will...
Casey Ruble: Except in Struggle
Casey Ruble’s first solo exhibition in New York should resonate with any child of mixed Asian decent: behind a superficial conflict between her meticulously painted warriors lies a deeper struggle between color and Eastern and Western influences.
Showing at the Foley Gallery, Ruble takes the title of her show from the seventh declaration of the 1909 Futurist manifesto, whose first line...
Kind Words from Beau Sia:
Subject:
uberion
Body:
thank you very much for taking the time to write me, and for letting me know about the site and my appearance on it. i’m glad you’re trying to explore and affirm your identity beyond what is being imposed on you by the world. i wish you strength with that. i also appreciate your positivity towards me. although i am awkward about accepting compliments, it feels...
4 tags
AiAiAi
If you’re an egghead like me, you know more than anyone that over-the-head headphones simply don’t fit over your enormous cranium. If you’re also an east coast elitist like me, you have absolutely destroyed many a Apple, stock white ear buds in a cynical rage as you untangle the chords for the upteenth time while fuming about campaign rhetoric. Thankfully, the nice folks at...
4 tags
Masao Yamamoto: Kawa-Flow
Masao Yamamoto’s current installation, entitled “Kawa-Flow,” is an anachronism, belonging to a sensibility that contrasts vividly with the large-scale color photographs that are prevalent today.
Yamamoto explores notions of memory and time in this collection of several dozen pocket-sized and intentionally worn photographs. Functioning like words or phrases in what Yamamoto...
2 tags
In Search of Freedom: An Evening of Music and...
Photo and text by Gaetano Ling
As pianist Cheol Woong Kim wiped sweat from his forehead with boyish mannerism, he sheepishly said through a translator, “This is the most nervous I’ve ever been at a performance.” He then bashfully laughed along with the packed crowd at Boston University’s Tsai Performance Center, which was primarily comprised of young music students and a...
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Behind the Scenes at Corduroy Magazine
H/C very pleased to announce that our dear friends at Corduroy magazine will be featuring a photospread with models of mixed heritage in their upcoming fall issue. The shoot took place on the roof of Corduroy’s Brooklyn studio in natural light with photographer Peter Ash Lee capturing the unique qualities of each model; celebrating the odd and distinctive nature which makes being a mutt so...
5 tags
Japón en Negro
This year’s San Sabastian Film Festival featured not only new films, but an interesting assemblage of old. The festival hosted a retrospective of Japanese Film Noir or Japon en Negro. A complex genre born out of imported American detective films, Japanese film noir is essentially American film noir digested by the Japanese post-war psyche. It even has its own nationalistic spin. The...
6 tags
3 Compilation Albums
After Apple went and took all the careful dedication out of assembling a good mix tape with their “genius” button for iTunes 8, H/C decided to commemorate three compilation albums that were curated by professionals, offering a mélange of artists worthy of articulating a particular period/style in music. Because no matter what Steve Jobs says, a playlist that includes both Cream and Jon...
4 tags
David David SS 09
With so much gloom surrounding the global economy, fruitless war efforts in the middle east, and impending political implosions for tonight’s VP debate, it’s a wonder that we all haven’t cashed out and assumed the fetal. Perhaps it is because we can take refuge in artistic escapes such as that presented by Zaiba Jabbaz’s short film for the David David spring/summer...
September 2008
20 posts
5 tags
3 Bento Boxes
With a failing economy and national obesity epidemic, now is the time to go cheaper and healthier by packing your own lunch for work or school. Here are three Japanese inspired bento boxes that upgrade dreary lunch affairs from the brown paper sack.
UP Box (pictured above)
The UP Box (the letters stand for Urban Picnic) is a market take away box that offers healthy, low-carb meals made, where...
5 tags
Jorge Pardo x LACMA
After a three year absence, the Latin American collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has reopened with a flourish with a reinstalation by Cuban born artist Jorge Pardo. Pardo, known for bluring the distinction between architecture, design and sculpture, revives the exhibition hall with a Brancussi like approach to artifiact displays: forms stacked on forms with material...
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Van Berkel & Bos - UNStudio
Rarely do the paths of architecture and astro physics intersect, then came along architect Ben Van Berkel. He and UNStudio co-founder Caroline Bos (also Van Berkel’s wife) are taking a unique, progressive approach to their structures through a profound interest in spacetime continuum. The approach is logical; afterall, buildings are a definition of space in which we occupy with time. The...
4 tags
Milk
Hong Kong based Milk operates more like a newsletter than a magazine. Milk’s international editorial team relays the newest and most exiting concepts and ideas on to the Hong Kongese youth in condenced, flyer like pages. With strong emphasis on graphics, there is actually very little to read while flipping through an issue of Milk. However, picking up on the latest local trend takes no...
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Retro Nike Chinese Tracksuit
Where having the latest and greatest is an affirmation of social status, vintage doesn’t even exist in the Chinese fashion vocabulary. The youth of Chinese middle class often refuse to buy a house that someone else has previously lived in, much less slip into a second-hand sweater, which is why Nike’s rivival of the 1984 Chinese Olympic tracksuit is creating a buzz on the streets of...
3 tags
Thievery Corporation - Radio Retaliation
Washington D.C.’s downtempo kings are back with the politically-charged Radio Retaliation, on which the duo of Rob Garza and Eric Hilton find new ways to incorporate sounds from Jamaica, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. This time around, Thievery Corporation utilize special guest appearances from Nigeria’s afro-beat heir, Femi Kuti, Brazilian star vocalist and...
3 tags
Sachiko Kodama
Japanese sculptor Sachiko Kodama creates ominous, kinetic works with a material typically used in mechanical and electronic engineering applications: ferrofluid. Ferrofluids are comprised of nano ferromagnetic particles that are suspended in a carrier fluid (typically water). In the presence of a strong magnetic field, the ferromagnetic particles become polarized, creating spikes in the...
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3 Highlights from La Noche en Blanco
Madrid celebrated its third edition of La Noche en Blanco earlier this week. Under the full moon, this all night festival commemorates the haunting and surreal as artists and visitors explore manifestations of illusion and dreams through artistic interventions celebrating the “hidden” Madrid. Here are three highlights from the mind bending experience.
The Deambulants
The...
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Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
In the future, this will be the Bible of design. William McDonough’s book, written with his colleague, the German chemist Michael Braungart, is a manifesto calling for the transformation of human industry through ecologically intelligent design for the next great industrial revolution. Through...
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3 Designers from Tokyo Fashion Week
While most of the industry had its eyes transfixed on Bryant Park this past week, let us not forget of the other fashion week that took place on the opposite side of the globe. Layers and knit wear were definitely this year’s trend in Tokyo, where classic style is often forgone for kawaii and quirk. Here are three designers who presented relatively reserved, wearable collections rather than...
5 tags
The Dragon’s Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan
The first comprehensive collection of Bhutanese sacred art showing in the United States, The Dragon’s Gift made its first stop at the Honolulu Academy of Arts this Februrary and is set to open at the Ruben Museum of Art in NYC on September 19.
Unlike your typical ‘acheological loot’ exhibitions, this collection is comprised of 87 works from a relatively mysterious country...
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What are you, Kala Alexander?
Kala Alexander is a line in the sand. Those who have searched “North Shore beatdown” on youtube know what happens when you cross that line. As his knuckles deftly indicate, he is a member of the Wolf Pak, a quasi gang of North Shore big wave surfers that claim territory to Hawaii’s winter coastlines. Even his no frills black Da Hui jams are a statement against the touristy,...
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Zoo York Roach Artist Series
Chicago has its cows, San Francisco has its hearts, and Zork York has its…roaches? Far from their cuddly ‘biomass as canvas’ companions of the midwest and westcoast, this highly anticipated series of skate decks from Zoo York draws inspiration from New York’s most persistent resident, the cockroach. Each pro model board features works from some of NYC’s most...
3 tags
Hiroshi Sugimoto
One of Japan’s most important contemporary artists, Hiroshi Sugimoto is known for his ongoing, multiple series of hauntingly beautiful black-and-white photographs, which explore the themes of time, memory, dreams, and natural histories. Working with a large-format camera, his glowing images range from the starkly minimal to the richly detailed, and are often suffused with expanses of light and...
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Metronomy - Nights Out
What is Nights Out? “It’s a soundtrack to a bad weekend,” claims front man Joseph Mount. Bad? He might have meant BIG.
What starts out as an outright weird mishmash of do-it-yourself Tetris tones and casio synths, the second album from the british electro band Metronomy shapes up into a geyser of party anthems. Within the first two songs it’s ripped through Middle Eastern...
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colette, Paris
Since its opening in March 1997, colette has been willing to be the place where fashion meets design, music meets publishing, beauty meets hi-tech and a place to discover art with its gallery or to relax at the water-bar. It’s a living space, in perpetual movement.
The Paris botique specializes in random knick-knack collaborations with the likes of Hello-Kitty, Asics, Ed Banger, and most...
4 tags
Half-Life of a Dream
Half-Life of a Dream, showing at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, features reactionary works from contemporary Chinese artists working in the wake of Tiananmen Square and dashed uptopian dreams of the Cultural Revolution. Approximately 50 paintings, sculptures, and installations spanning 1988 to 2008 convey a sense of the shadows, masks, and monsters that have haunted the China’s...
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3 Tweed Jackets
It’s back to school season which means fall foliage and new beginnings. Whether you’re a freshman moving into the dorms or a seasoned ivy leaguer, nothing states your arrival to higher education more emphatically than a tweed jacket. Here are three jackets that will surely make a fine first impression on your classmates and professors as you huff across campus this fall semester (elbow...
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Lucas Isawa
São Paulo based sculptor Lucas Isawa combines the Japanese traditions of koinobori and paper lanterns to create delicate forms that are a breathtaking spectable.
Isawa begins by stripping each bamboo branch and then meticulously ties them together, forming the ‘skeleton’ for his dangling fish sculptures. He then fills gaps with silk paper and suspends each piece from the ceiling...
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What are you, Beau Sia?
Beau Sia is a being from the future here to assure you that everything is going to be okay. He speaks english good. He is in his room chasing Bruce Lee. He is gathering up all the baby kittens in the anticipation of the second coming of Alf. And he is holding a box to his head.
Raised in Oklahoma City, Beau Sia moved to New York in 1995 and has said that moving to the Big Apple is what made him...
August 2008
28 posts
4 tags
superfuture
With labor day creeping up and summer vacationers squeezing in that last trip before fall, superfuture offers a valuable map tool for the lone traveler. Founded under the premise that one doesn’t always have time to show visiting friends around the city, superfutre is a collection of interactive maps highlighting cool shopping, food, art, hotels and bars for a variety of international...