-
East Asia
People, stories, orientations
In the conservative city of Daegu, South Korea, lives Matthew, an American man who works there. He shared his stories and life experiences as a foreign LGBT person based in South Korea. Where are you from? I am from a rural area in the state of Pennsylvania in the…
Read More » -
East Asia
Malleable Identity, Molded Identity
What makes you you? Is it your fingerprint? Maybe the passport you show to the officer before your flight. At any first meeting, people will ask one another, “What’s your name?”, “Your job?”, or “Where are you from?”. And then you will go down the list, describing yourself according…
Read More » -
East Asia
Buddhism is a Gender Equal Religion. Or Maybe Not.
Buddhism in the Korean Peninsula Buddhism is one of the main religions in South Korea: in fact, 15.5% of the population is Buddhist. The religion first came to the Korean peninsula from China during the 4th century. Nowadays, there are the different schools of Seon (Korean Zen), Jogye Order, Taego,…
Read More » -
Culture
Looking and Painting through Windows
Born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1973, Bilal Bassal is an artist currently living and working in Paris. After studying drawing and painting at Institute of Fine Arts in Lebanon, he settled down in France, where he studied The Art of Engraving and Printing at École supérieure des arts appliqués. In 2000, he…
Read More » -
Culture
“Think outside the box, collapse the box, and take a fucking sharp knife to it”: How Artists Describe the World
Back in 2010, when Banksy, an anonymous England-based graffiti artist and film director, visited San Francisco, his work popped up in various neighborhoods. A curator, Brian Greif, had taken off a part of the wall that had Banksy’s graffiti to preserve it; he looked for a museum that accepted the…
Read More » -
East Asia
“We Cannot All Succeed When Half of Us Are Held Back”: The F-word and the Struggle of the Female Emancipation
The Republic of Gilead is the authoritarian, theocratic regime that takes over the United States in The Handmaid’s Tale, a Hulu original series based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel. The TV series portrays a world overrun by misogyny and radical Christianity. The residents believe in their patriarchal society, which involves…
Read More » -
Culture
[Book Review] A Journey Between Literature and Philosophy
The Unbearable Lightness of Being By Milan Kundera, Gallimard, 1984 Set in Czechoslovakia in 1968, The Unbearable Lightness of Being explores the artistic and intellectual life of Czech society in the 1960s and 1970s across the stories of four characters. Tomas, a surgeon, has managed to separate love and…
Read More » -
Culture
[Book Review] Questioning the Role of Women in the 19th Century
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen, Thomas Egerton, 1813 Set in rural England in the early 1800s, Pride and Prejudice is a novel of the Bennett family’s story. The family includes a negligent father, a silly empty-headed mother, and five daughters: the eldest Jane, Elizabeth (also called Lizze and sometimes,…
Read More » -
East Asia
[Book Rewiev] Charles Bukowski, the Outsider Genius of the American Literature
[Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness] Charles Bukowski, City Lights Publishers, 1972 Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions, and General Tales of Ordinary Madness is a paperback collection of short stories written by Charles Bukowski, published in 1972. Each story is based on first-person narration, compiling stories that are personally…
Read More » -
Central Asia
“Big Brother is Watching You”: a Dystopian Journey through the Rating System for the Chinese Citizens
Launched on Britain’s Channel 4 in 2011 and then acquired by Netflix in 2015, Black Mirror is a tv series created by Charlie Brooker. The episodes are standalone works about the interaction between people and technology and about future behaviors. Among the episodes, Nosedive is one of the most interesting:…
Read More »