Bali 1952: Through the Lens of Liu Kang documents a seven-week trip to Java and Bali in 1952 by four China-born and Shanghai-trained Singapore artists—Chen Wen Hsi, Chen Chong Swee, Cheong Soo Pieng and Liu Kang—to sketch and paint tropical beauty.
Category Archive: Reviews
That Before Colonization can be read in several ways is to its favour, but also makes it hard to review. It takes aim at the way international relations (referred to by the field’s formal initials IR) has tended to go about its business; it is also a refreshingly straightforward discussion of, as in the subtitle, “Non-Western States and Systems in the Nineteenth Century”, which includes clear explanations of theory as well as numerous interesting examples. But, most interestingly perhaps, authors Charles R Butcher and Ryan D Griffiths also treat their data statistically, implying that IR could do with some additional empirical rigor.
It’s customary to begin writing on North Korea by acknowledging how difficult it is to get reliable information from such a secretive and tightly-controlled regime in such a highly politicized context. Though an undoubtedly repressive regime, in an information vacuum misinformation can spread, such as the easily-disproved but persistent misconception that all North Korean citizens must sport the same distinctive hairstyle as their leader Kim Jong-un.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and what is now celebrated in Vietnam as the unification of the country. Outside of Vietnam, this anniversary is tinted with stories of exile, of loss and trauma, of surviving in a new country and culture, where Vietnamese voices often go unheard. The Cleaving is a collection of conversations between writers and artists of Vietnamese heritage, from those who have been creating for decades to those who have just published their debut novel, in which they share their experiences and reflections on this journey of survival over the last half century.
The ghosts of those wronged in war invariably call out for vengeance. When the conflict is a civil war, all the more so. Families may be split apart, feuds started, and children called upon to settle scores they weren’t alive to start. The civil war that swept through China from 1927 to 1949 is no exception, and the continued tension between Taiwan and the Chinese mainland is the legacy of that conflict. In his novel Ryu—translated into English by Alison Watts—Akira Higashiyama explores the history of the Chinese Civil War and the conflicts it engenders generations later. Although originally written in Japanese, Ryu (a transliteration of the novel’s Japanese title) is a thoroughly Taiwanese novel that takes readers on an exciting odyssey through life in Taipei in the 1970s.
Kōhaku, the annual singing competition between the red and white teams, is a popular New Year’s event in Japan. In One Hundred Flowers, mother and son gather to celebrate the holiday at home by watching the program and eating dinner—a poignant reminder of how their relationship has changed over time. As a single mother, Yuriko was solely responsible for her son’s upbringing, but as the only child, Izumi increasingly finds himself taking care of his mother now as her memory begins to deteriorate.
In his book Tianjin Cosmopolis, Pierre Singaravélou remarks that “The history of modernity is a history of possible futures as much as a study of the processes of modernization.” Thanks to a new translation from the original French, English readers now have a chance to consider one possible future of China that never came to pass. Hewing to primary sources and refraining from simple narratives, Singaravélou details the agency and dynamism of the late Qing response to Western intrusion.
Initially evoking the sterile chill of a dystopian sci-fi tale, with horse-riding jockey robots and humans replaced by automation, Cheon Seonran’s A Thousand Blues quickly reveals itself as something far richer: a thoughtful exploration of humanity’s uneasy coexistence with technology, as well as the contradictions of a society that both creates and undermines its own systems of care.
In Sanjena Sathian’s new novel, Goddess Complex, women’s bodies are reduced to the idea of their divine if not interchangeable—wombs. The protagonist, Sanjana Satyananda (the stark similarity in names between the author and her character is no coincidence) is a thirty-something burnt-out academic who feels intense alienation toward motherhood. She spends the course of the novel hopping from America to India, trying to stabilise her increasingly volatile sense of self in a world that prizes her fertility and criticises her choices.
Set in West Bengal, Aurko Maitra’s debut novella The Spider grapples with the human predisposition to violence, to unmediated crimes of rape and murder. Maitra has spent part of his career as a journalist in this state of east India known for endless political violence, which, like clockwork, occurs as local elections approach and politicians with deep pockets hire gangs of mercenaries to instigate riots and raid opposing Party strongholds. He has interviewed both victims and perpetrators in the area, and from these interviews, The Spider was born.
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