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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...