Tag: Asia

Interview with Abii about Porcelain Paintings to Tattoos

While Abii earned a degree in scenography from Sangmyung University in 2011 due to her love of reading plays and visualizing theatrical sets, her student hobby was porcelain painting, which influenced her career choice (resulting in six years as a professional porcelain artist). Her interest in tattoos sprang from a desire to see her works […]

Tattooing Beloved Pets: An Interview with Kimria

The South Korean film industry, like the tattoo industry, is thriving. South Korea is a fine-line micro tattooing powerhouse because the quality and skill are exceptional, as demonstrated by Kimria, a Seoul-based artist specializing in pet portraits on skin. Kimria, who works in black-and-grey and color, discusses her passion for assisting clients in reconnecting with […]

Anticipating Asian Cinema in 2019

Anticipation is an expression of bias, which is not to say that the bias is uninformed. I have seen only two of the ten Asian films listed below (“Burning” and “Believer,” both for festivals)—but my piqued interest in the others is not entirely arbitrary. What commends these various titles from Japan, China, Korea and Laos […]

Ten Best Movies of 2018

2018 has been an incredible for movies. So good in fact, compiling a list of ten films was a tough nut to crack. Plenty of excellent titles were left out. “Roma,” “Sorry To Bother You,” “Loveless,” “Blackkklansman,” “Downsizing,” “Western” and “Climax” all deserve honourable mentions. While summer blockbuster “Mission: Impossible–Fallout” gets a special shout-out for […]

India’s Sunny Bhanushali Tattoos Elaborately in Realism Style

“For me, (knowledge) sharing for good is the ultimate goal of a human being,” comments Sunny Bhanushali, a tattooist and owner of Aliens Tattoo studio in Mumbai; founder of Online Tattoo Learning program and India’s First Tattoo School where he teaches aspiring artists about his trade. “The more I teach, the better I have gotten with […]

Gakkin x Nissaco: Blackwork Tattoos

Both tattooists Gakkin and Nissaco are on our top picks of 2017. They’ve produced incredible works on skin, all in black ink, fusing both traditional and contemporary Japanese styles in their art. Their work is bold, beautiful and meticulous. Both artists are perfectionists, and seeing their line-and-dot-work up close at the London Convention really confirmed […]

Hidden Hearts: Creepy Hollowed-Out Dolls by Mari Shimizu

Mari Shimizu is an artist from Amakusa in Kumamoto Prefecture, Japan, who creates hollowed-out ball-joint dolls. Each doll is unique in that the contents of their eviscerated torsos reveal different elements of horror and fantasy. In a statement provided to Illusion, Shimizu explains how “We hide our hearts from our families and friends in order […]