The Team

My first viewing of Wong Kar-Wai’s deeply melancholic In The Mood for Love (2000) was also the first time I’ve heard of Bengawan Solo in a foreign film or any foreign media for that matter. It was odd and surprising. I was completely ignorant of the influence this local Indonesian folk song had overseas before […]

Kurosawa’s doctors can be interpreted to be his own alter ego transcribed into characters in his films. They reflect his own personal beliefs regarding moralities and what a human should strive for to obtain what he thinks would be a fulfilling life. American film historian Stephen Prince noted that for Akira Kurosawa, life’s meaning lies […]

Apocalyptic visions have pervaded through our collective consciousness since the start of the year. Although hardly new, considering tales concerning the end of the world have been told for as long as anyone could remember and as far back as historical (and religious) texts allow, a truly global destructive event like a pandemic was only […]

There’s a lot to say about Pyramids, one of the single and narrative axis of Frank Ocean’s 2012 widely-revered album Channel Orange. In truth, there’s a lot to say about any of Frank Ocean’s songs with their dynamic production and lyrical tours de force. But there is just something distinctively more ambitious with what Frank […]

The planet and its organic inhabitants, with the human-advanced techniques and processes for the expansion of life—and consequently its evolution—manifestly termed otherwise as ‘technology’, could to certain extents, have its ramifications explored by way of constructing it within a framework of cities. Technology Towards an Expansion While comprehensively each and every individual city would be […]

(This essay is a ‘case study’ type of essay that includes self authored graphical analyses) Context  Located in the Coliumo peninsula of Chile, Casa Poli is a residence designed by Mauricio Pezo & Sofia von Ellrichshausen—principals of their established firm Pezo von Ellrichshausen—that sits heroically, yet solitarily atop a dramatic cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean’s […]

“Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change. The […]

Context / Introduction The peculiar relationship between ‘form’ and ‘function’ is central to unravelling the significance of architecture on the built environment. The two concepts, where ‘function’ deals with what range of activity ensues in a building and where ‘form’ implies the overall outward appearance of a building, hastens the crystallization of an individual’s essential […]

Embodying a romantic ode to mankind’s search for a magnum opus, Maurizio’s photographs are a manifesto to the insurgence of a deviation from art as a set of embodied meanings communicated by artists and instead as fragments of our souls.

To advocate for the Indonesia’s first Anti Sexual Violence Bill, artists have utilised many tools and mediums including films as a reflective mirror of the present society. And out of those films produced and released during the four year advocacy period, Posesif (2017) and 27 Steps of May (2019) stand out as prominent portrayals of Indonesia’s variable spectrum in understanding sexual violence.

Putting Lovecraft’s Call of Cthulhu in context with its religious elements

Like many art forms, films pull into their repertoire a series of cultural references ranging from fine and contemporary art to architecture and literature. Some notable art references films pull from would be poetry that is inserted into dialogues, plot devices, and more. Some have even gone as far as calling films “poetry in motion” […]

For much of its history, Japan and the horror genre have gone hand in hand. Whether it’s the nation’s orally passed down traditions, artworks, folklore of the ancient past, the theatrical productions of kabuki and noh, or through to the more recent advent of cinema; Japan has undeniably fostered one of the richest and most […]

Takeshi Kitano’s rise to fame in the world of film has been a strange one. He originally found much success in his native Japan as a comedian, working alongside his friend Kiyoshi Kaneko to form a double act known as “The Two Beats” (referring to their stage names, Beat Takeshi and Beat Kiyoshi respectively). This […]

Benedict Anderson, the forefather of Southeast Asian Studies, once wondered why throughout the last 110 years, this region is the remaining in the world to never have a writer crowned Nobel Laureate in Literature. Indeed, though not widely known, let alone read in the West, the literature of modern Southeast Asia has produced some of […]