Seoul song

 

And offbeat, and pleasantly understated, song (and video) from K-pop royalty Lee Hyori.

Biennale

One of the art world’s most glittering events, The Venice Biennale, is on again, in a peupose-built village of national pavilions decked out by different artists by the Venetian lagoon. Australia is this year represented by Tracey Moffatt (below, some of her previous works including the iconic “Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy”)

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Below, the work of Cody Choi who has designed Korea’s 2017 Venice pavilion.

 

Day glo trippin’ : When K-Pop takes drugs

Singapore: art

A stunning installation in Singapore of giant, luminous crocheted sea urchins (!!) by Korean and American architectural firm Choi & Shine.

Seoul : Boys keep on swinging

 

When I lived in Seoul way back when, the city was stiflingly conservative (at its first ever gay pride march, participants wore paper bags over their heads). Yet even then it had a small but very energetic gay scene. All that pent-up sexual energy, hidden behind polite smiles and three piece suits during the week, would ignite on smoky dancefloors on the weekend on the poky dancefloors of “Homo Hill,” the city’s fledgling gayberhood in the district of Itaewon. Since then, this scene has blossomed to include circuit parties and go-go boys, a gay coffee house, bars called GRINDR and Shortbus, hot clubs like Gray and Looking Star, hipster-gay magazines (Duiro) and fashion brands (VEAK, Two Much,Woo Yeah), artists like Nahwan Jeon and now new party, Gag reflex. Somehow, somewhere, Seoul has turned into arguably the gay party capital of Northern Asia.

Nahwan Jeon: gay cyclops in love

   

 

Korean drag queens, Thai hipsters

Above, the video for Korean folk maverick Lang Lee and below, Bangkok hipster posse         X0809.

 

The Two Koreas

 

Transglobal underground

It has been a flurry of activity lately, with various cool projects crisscrossing the globe. Taiwanese rapper Aristophanes and Bangkok’s Paradise Mo Lam Orchestra are arriving in Melbourne for the contemporary Asian arts festival Asiatopa. Melbourne’s Trough X party meanwhile is exploring another continent, branching out to London while Korean gay hipster magazine Duiro is popping-up in Seoul.

21st century boy

 

Meet the new face of Seoul, 16-year-old Nigerian-Korean model Han Hyun Min, who broke out at this year’s Seoul Fashion Week. Sign o’ the times.

Jihae, “The Model”

Je Yeo Ran

G-Dragon-approved abstract expressionism from Korea.

  

Instafamous

I recently joined instagram, mostly to brighten up my life with a feed of #instagay celebrities, avant-garde fashion icons and other assorted interesting people while I sit on the bus.

Like the flamboyantly funny Thai TV hostess Madam Mod.

New York go-go boy Matthew Camp, currently hawking his own fragrance, called 8.5.

Belo Horizonte muscle-hipster Joapane.

 

The swoonsome immense_ray (言武) in Shanghai.

  

Dandrogyny, who performs at Melbourne’s HonchoDisko night (how did I miss that?)

 

And Japanese go-go king Kenta, now repping his boyfriend’s Korean clubwear brand, VEAKSeoul.

Duiro: Woo Yeah!

The very fresh and stylish-looking Korean gay magazine Duiro has released its second issue, on the theme of “marriage”. If I am understanding this (Korean) facebook post correctly, it is looking for crowdfunding to print the issue, with a tie-up with underwear/fetishwear company Woo Yeah as a possible incentive. The issue looks great so I hope they will get it off the ground!

STOP PRESS: You can order a copy here.

K-Pop break

 

One of the members is from Melbourne (Box Hill to be exact).

Korea via Berlin: the minimal techno of Peggy Gou

K-voodoo: I saw the devil

The Wailing is a long, intense horror flick which mines an interesting seam of Korean culture, its pre-Confucian shaman beliefs. In this battle of light and dark, a mudang – or witch doctor – is bought into a small Korean town to do battle with a force of evil emanating – or is it? – from a strange old man who lives on a nearby mountain. Its a strange, ambiguous and compelling movie with some well-executed shocks, some extraordinary scenes that seem to have almost come out of a (great) anthropological doco, a few very dark laughs and a lingering question posed at the end…definitely worth a look.

Take me to Hong Kong

The Hong Kong Tourism Board teams up with some popular Korean youtubers for its latest promotional video, a play on the Korean slang term “to take someone to Hong Kong” – meaning (my Korean friends explained) “to give someone an orgasm.”

A weekend of surprises.

There wasn’t really a plan for this weekend, but as sometimes happens, that made it all the more interesting. My boyfriend was late for a swimming date which was commuted to dinner on Friday night so I ended up waiting in the re-opened People’s Recreation Community, a little upstairs bookshop in the hubhub of Times Square, specialising in Chinese language books banned on the mainland. These consisted of tomes on the ever-fascinating topics of (in order of popularity) feng shui, sex and politics. I was pleased to see the place open, its owner having only recently returned from his politically-motivated abduction and arrest on the mainland, and bought a book in solidarity, a Shigeru Mizuki comic. They actually have a small but quite interesting English selection, as well as (uncensored!) internet booths and a modest two-table cafe serving comfort food.

From here we set off to eat, and to celebrate – I hadn’t realised that the next day was a public holiday! Scouring the backstreets of Causeway Bay without much of a plan we ended up in a twenty storey-high office block into which I had never ventured but which turned out to be piled high with restaurants and thronged with customers. There were Japanese oyster bars, a vegetarian Sichian restaurant, a 1980s Guangdong-style BBQ place with luridly painted mural walls and a manequin of a girl in a leather miniskirt, and finally a rowdy Korean joint. Here, students snacked on fried chicken and squid’s legs wrapped in cheese and graffitied the bare concrete walls, while knocking back bottles of cider held upside down into large glasses of melon soda. It felt like a little slice of Seoul, totally unexpected, and it was called “Mr Korea Chicken”.

  

The next day, again unplanned, we got up early to head out for a hike and picked the Twin Peaks trail, which sets off from the Parkview housing estate and heads Southwest across the island to Stanley.

As we climbed up into the forested slopes along muddy paths, our voices echoed through the valleys and billowing white cloud wrapped around us. It was hard to believe we were in the middle of one of the world’s busiest cities! Truly amazing. We passed the Tai Tam reservoir and vistas of rolling hills covered with trees and then began the grueling 1000-step staircase of the first of the two forested mountains, before tackling the final peak and descending to Stanley below us. Beautiful.

As we got down to Stanley, the cloud lifted and the sun came out. After a lunch soundtracked by Ella Fitzgerald at an idiosyncratic little cafe in a corner of Stanley Market called Lucy’s Kitchen, we headed down to a sunny, secretive little beach. We had seen this from above as we descended. It was near where a war cemetery sits on a well-manicured lawn and bright laundry flapped on the balconies of the correctional services staff apartments for the families of those staffing the nearby prison.  Via streets of hundred-million-dollar mansions and thick green foliage we arrived at St Stephen’s beach and splashed about contentedly as the sun shone down, a few children played and the clear, warm water washed our tired bodies. Floating on the sea, we could look up and see the path on the hillside which we had so recently descended.

The final surprise of the day came back in Causeway Bay. After a cheap but hearty vegetarian meal and a massage in a little Thai place located semi-legally in a residential block, it was time to head home. But it was only then that my partner realised he had lost his housekey somewhere and we had to wait for him to pick up his spare from his mum, before we could finally pile into bed, worn-out after an action-packed and adventurous day, thankful for the incredible variety of scenery Hong Kong island packs into such a compact package.

Wknd report

After a sunny, productive week of work back in Hong Kong, it was time for a leisurely weekend. I saw my second great Korean zombie movie in as many weeks, and then the next day enjoyed a Saturday breakfast of organic baguette slices at Le Pain Quotidienne, while reading  Knausgaard on my kindle , (as I probably will for weekends to come).

On a whim, I went to an exhibition of conceptual artwork by Cannes Palm d’Or winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul, held at Quarry Bay’s Parasite art space. The show confirmed that as much as I love both things Thai and arthouse cinema, I don’t quite *get* Apichatpong. The show here consisted largely of projections of ordinary-looking Thais, doing everyday things, slowly, in mundane surrounds. Whatever it was that these were meant to say I missed. There were two pieces that struck me though – a portrait of a reclining dude (which, it turns out, is the director’s real life partner) and finally a darkened room where another image was projected, the naturalistic silhouette of a red dog which wandered and faded, skipping between the different walls.

Gym. The hot press of Mongkok weekend crowds. A few hours of housework and domestic loafing, with the windows thrown open. For dinner, we had good Lebanese food: baba ganoush and pitta bread, and roasted cauliflower.

This was followed by a sunny Sunday of swimming, reading on a dozy cafe terrace overlooking the Pok Fu Lam straits, then the schlockfest of Jaws. All in all, not a bad weekend.