Loving Monsieur Butterfly: A Tale of Espionage, Romance and the Transgender Soprano

It began with a glance, as so many love stories do. Bernard Boursicot was your average, unremarkable accountant at the French Embassy of 1960s Beijing. Shi Pei Pu was anything but forgettable, a rising opera star in the city who enraptured her soon-to-be lover, and eventual father of her child after a chance meeting at…

The Art of Power Clashing

“Power clashing” is an art not easily learned, but Alexander Gorlizki lives, breathes, and paints it in his art. The intricate, bright prints and designs look like they’ve been sourced from an ancient Islamic library and combined with vintage Bollywood pop culture. We see both Eastern and Western influencers – dare we say there might…

Japan’s Ancient Attitude to Sex was Way Freakier than you’d Imagine

At a glance, the picture looks perfectly innocent: a 19th century, posh portrait of woman sipping tea. Upon closer examination, we learn she’s made up of entangled copulating bodies. Welcome to the fascinating world of ye olde Japanese erotica. Known as “shunga” (春画), the genre flourished in the Edo period (1600s-1800s), and the artworks didn’t…

Where has the Dystopian Wonderland of Taxandria been Hiding all Our Lives?

Our dreams have always remained an ineffable, un-shareable experience – the kind of thing we can describe, but never quite convey to the fullest. Then, we saw Taxandria. The 1994 film by Belgium’s Raoul Servais is the closest we’ve felt to stepping inside a world that feels just as slippery, strange, and intuitive as our…

The Pearly Wonders of Renaissance Bling

Pearls have always been in a league of their own. As souvenirs from the depths of New World waters in the 15th century, they were simply something diamonds, emeralds, and rubies could never be: alive. Pearls were ghostly. They were animal, and alien. They ushered in a quiet war and a “Pearl Rush” of their…

Oh, Just an Utterly Insane Japanese Robot Restaurant

There are themed restaurants, and then there’s Japan’s Robot Restaurant, which will steam roll your brain with glow sticks, techno, and robots. Running counter to the Japanese cultural rubric usually shown, it’s a space age Cirque du Soleil on acid or a cyberpunk Moulin Rouge that gives a mind-blowing taste for bedazzled silliness and whimsical…

The Accidentally Couture Life of a Samurai

How do you dress for a dance with death? If you were a 14th century Samurai, the pressure was on to go into battle with a kabuto (helmet) that subscribed to a fiercely maximalist vision. These incredible creations varied in form and detail depending on the owner and era, but they were always big, bedazzled, and…

Night of the Living Painting

It was a flourishing trade in human flesh. A quest headed by art suppliers so ruthless in seeking out the perfect pigment, that it makes Dorian Grey’s creep-level look like amateur hour. It was the business of making “Mummy Brown,” a paint colour that quite literally required the ground up remains of mummies to achieve…

Muse du Jour: Lady Miss Kier

Armed with a pair of hot pants and a Cheshire Cat grin, Miss Lady Kier became the lighting rod of ’80s and ’90s electro-pop. As the front woman for Deee-Lite, her intensity turned songs like “Groove Is in the Heart” into pure eardrum candy in the midst of a time when grunge was on the…

Were Romans the First Goths?

The good people of the Roman Empire tend to be remembered as gladiators and prodigious builders of roads, temples and aqueducts who loved to drink lots of wine and end up in bed with their siblings. It’s far less common that we think of Romans as a morbid civilisation, obsessed with their own death culture.…