Asia has always been intercultural. The images (mostly artworks) on this blog are fun little reminders of that. It's pretty well known today that the "civilisations" of our world have been trading goods and ideas for thousands of years. Wonderful blogs like Medieval POC - http://medievalpoc.tumblr.com - how European art included and was influenced by non-white people. I'm using this platform to share examples of how the same is true of Asia: how the cultures of Asia have coloured each other and the rest of the planet (and vice versa) since forever and ever and ever.
There are good and great JTTW adaptations, but no bad ones because we skip bad and jump straight to #cursed. Not all the above tropes are bad, but they’re definitely the most likely to appear in a CURSED jttw adaptation.
This bingo card only includes so many because we should never underestimate the creativity of JTTW producers and their ability to come up with more and never-seen-before cursed ideas out of nowhere! Every cursed JTTW adaptation is unique in its own right and can’t be contained to a single bingo card!
How could I fit in “Sanzang is the Six Eared Macaque’s time traveling son from the past” and “Lady Iron Fan has an affair with Taishun Laojung and has Red Boy out of wedlock” and “Jade Emperor cheats on Queen Mother with Guanyin” and “Wukong must protect Rudolph the red nosed reindeer from Erlang Shen and Nezha” into a single card when all these tropes are special to their own adaptations???
**Inspired by @ancientphantom‘s Bad Phantom Adaptation Bingo.
A list of Asian LGBT musicians living in Asia, as opposed to my other list which mostly contained Asian-American or British Asian musicians.
Link to LGBT Musician Google Spreadsheet with over 500 Queer Musicians.
Anthony Wong Yiu-ming - Chinese gay man living in Hong Kong & Cantopop artist who first became known as the vocalist for Cantopop duo “Tat Ming Pair” in the 80s. In 2012 he publicly came out, saying “I’m gay. I’m a homosexual. G-A-Y.” He has also worked as a DJ, a solo singer, and a music producer and founded the production company “People Mountain People Sea.”
Ataru Nakumura - Japanese trans woman & Jpop Idol who began writing songs at a very young age. Her single “Tomodachi no Uta” deals with her struggling with her sexuality and feelings for her close friend. She wrote that song when she was just 14 and it was the first song she ever wrote!
EXO-CHIKA (Aural Vampire) - Bisexual Japanese woman belonging to the Darkwave group “Aural Vampire.” AV is led by her and RAVEMAN, with EXO-CHIKA supplying the vocals. She’s stated that she is bisexual in multiple interviews but due to the fact that I dont speak Japanese, i can’t find which ones or link them.
Harisu - Korean trans woman, Kpop Idol, model, and actress. Her stage name is inspired by the english phrase “Hot Issue” and she certainly is. On December 13th 2002 she became only the second person in the Republic of Korea to legally have their sex corrected and changed. Her music has been described as “Techno-flavored Kpop.”
Holland - Korean gay man & Kpop Idol. Holland became widely known on tumblr and other social medias as the “first gay kpop idol.” He released his first song “Neverland” in early 2018 and released a very gay music video to accompany it.
Hurong Giang - Vietnamese trans woman & pop musician. In 2012 she became the first transgender person to participate in the Vietnamese Idol music talent contest and made it to the final 4 contestant group and in 2013 she released her first album. In 2018 she was crowned Miss Transgender International in Thailand.
Moga Mogami - bisexual Japanese woman & Jpop musician who was formerly a member of the female Idol group “Dempagumi.inc”. She came out in 2017 and is focusing on her solo career right now!
MRSHLL - Korean gay man & R&B musician. He is known as the first Korean musician to come out and debut in Korea, although Holland was the first Korean gay Idol. His album “breathe” is amazing.
Secret Guyz - Japanese J-pop group consisting of all transgender men. they made their debut in 2013 with the single “HugXHug” and have some awesome and very creative videos.
Venus Flytrap - Thai 2005 pop group consisting of five transgender women. They were the first all transgender group in Thailand with a recording contract!
But wait, you’re thinking – Lakshmi is a Hindu goddess, right? She is, the goddess of wealth, fortune and prosperity and the wife of Vishnu.
But this particular Lakshmi figurine was found in the ruins of Pompeii. It is beautiful proof of the trade links between the Roman Empire and the other great civilizations of their day.
Images taken from theTurkish version of ‘Aja'ib al-makhluqat (Wonders of creation) by Zakariya al-Qazwini (died 692 AH/AH 1293) completed in 1121 AH/AD 1717 by Muhammad ibn Muhammad Shakir Ruzmah-‘i Nathani.
By the start of the westernized period in the Sinosphere, all the emperors of East Asia had adopted western clothing.
However, Vietnam was quite exceptional. Emperor Khải Định, seen on top, was actually wearing the traditional military attire of Nguyễn dynasty with the Nguyễn turban. However, as a prolific fashion and architecture designer, he littered it with western medals and epaulettes on his shoulders, making it resemble western clothing. His creativity in the arts and his contribution to Việt phục evolution is still well-known to this day.
In the early twentieth century, most Chinese immigrants coming to the United States were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. There, they were subject to physical exams, interrogations, and often long detentions aimed at upholding the exclusion laws that kept Chinese out of the country. Many detainees recorded their anger and frustrations, hopes and despair in poetry written and carved on the barrack walls.
Poem 135 (image 2), etched into the walls of a lavatory room on the first floor of the detention barracks, and was written by a Chinese Mexican waiting to be deported to China in the early 1930s:
Detained in this wooden house for several tens of days,
It is all because of the Mexican exclusion law that implicates me.
It’s a pity heroes have no way of exercising their prowess.
I can only await the word so that I can snap Zu’s whip.
From now on, I am departing far from this building.
All of my fellow villagers are rejoicing with me.
Don’t say that everything within is Western style.
Even if it is built of jade, it has turned into a cage.
I miss updating too. But I’m writing more, exercising more, and still updating my @selfportraitsofcolor blog, so I’m pretty happy right now. I’m afraid that diving into the blog would derail my life a little... <3
Selamat Hari Merdeka / Happy Malaysian Independence Day!
Yasmin Ahmad and Kamal Mustafa
Little Indian Boy
Malaysia (1996)
[Source]
I’d like to mark this date by sharing an old Malaysian independence day ad written by the late filmmaker and advertising maven, Yasmin Ahmad.
Amir Muhammad writes for The Museum of the Moving Image:
This commercial made Yasmin's name as a writer and it's probably still my favorite. It was very unconventional to have a commercial that wasn't trying to sell a product but tell a story instead. The story itself is familiar to every Malaysian, of course, but the proclamation of independence by our first prime minister is given a spin by being told from the point of view of the eponymous boy. (You never even get to see [first Malaysian Prime Minister] Tunku Abdul Rahman, but you do hear his iconic shout.)
The fact that the boy is Indian is immediately striking: even today, Indians are rarely shown in Malaysian advertisements because they have the lowest buying power of the country's ethnic groups and are thus considered the least "glamorous." Seeing him being fussed over by his family in the beginning, you think he's going through some kind of rite of passage (just like Ganesh's pre-wedding oil bath later in Talentime). It is only at the end, when everything becomes color and set in the present day, that you appreciate that it's not only him but the whole nation that is shown in a pivotal moment of growing up. When Indians do appear in local films, they are often slapstick figures. But the boy and his father (who are never shown speaking) radiate dignity.
There were people, foreigners as well as locals, who worried in 1957 whether Malaya (as it was then called) would ever become a viable nation or instead be torn apart by post-colonial internecine strife. The whites had been seen as benevolent protectors for so long (our colonial history wasn't all that bloody; some Indonesian friends tell me, "You should be grateful you had the British: they left behind good schools!") that the future seemed literally unimaginable. But the boy's family feels that they have a stake in this nation; after all, they had helped to build it and would continue to do so. No one in the flashback scene is shown wearing glasses, but the adult he becomes at the end has glasses, a sign of education. There are two separate shots that show the father lifting up the son. This is like the famous Newton line: "If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants."
At the time the commercial aired, the stadium it was set in, Merdeka, was on the verge of being demolished to make way for another commercial project—yet another sign of how little we value our history. Thankfully the proposal was shelved. Speaking of history: Independence Day had become a hoary nationalistic cliché by this time, replete with tacky parade floats and bombastic speeches. But for a minute and a half, everything lived again with a thrilling immediacy that brought goose pimples to more than a few.
I am intrigued by that dragon in the first image—how it’s clearly meant to be a Chinese dragon, but it has wings, which are characteristic of western dragons.
The spread of chickens around the world is intimately linked to the movement of people. Research from New Zealand sheds light on how and when they arrived
Chickens are native to the tropical jungles of Southeast Asia, but over the last approximately 8,000 years, chickens have been domesticated and spread around the globe to become one of the most valued domesticated animals. These fairly shy forest birds lack the ability for long-distance flying and are not migratory. As such, their spread around the world is not just a tale of domestication, but one that is intimately linked to the movements of people around the world.
Darwin was the first to suggest that all domestic chickens descended from the red junglefowl Gallus gallus... The rise of new molecular techniques, such as DNA analysis, allowed scientists to look at the domestication of chickens at a whole new level. An early study of mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) showed that domestic chickens indeed descended from the red junglefowl, and indicated that a single domestication event had taken place in Thailand (Fumihito et al., 1996). More recent studies showed that the domestication of chickens occurred in at least three separate regions in Asia (Liu et al., 2006). Moreover, domesticated chickens interbred with local populations of different wild jungle fowl species; the gene for yellow legs, an ubiquitous characteristic of domesticated chickens, can be traced back to the closely related grey junglefowl (Gallus sonneratii) (Eriksson et al., 2008) rather than the red junglefowl.
From southern Asia, the chicken left its natural range behind and embarked on its Grand Tour. Domestic chickens reached West Asia and the Near East during the third and second millennium BC, and were introduced to Europe by the Phoenicians during the 8th century BC (Perry-Gal et al., 2015). Up till then, chickens had had a mostly ceremonial or symbolic role, as evidenced by the inclusion of chickens in burials, clay figurines in early Chinese cultures and mentions of chickens in early texts. As chickens spread through Europe, chicken remains in archaeological assemblages became more abundant. This indicates that chickens had started to form an established part of European livestock, and the sagas have it that when the Vikings colonised Iceland in the 10th century, they took along their chickens.
Today’s chickens represent a range of different sizes, body proportions, plumage colours, behaviour, and physiological traits related to meat and egg production. Although it is thought that many modern breeds originated relatively recently (in the 18th-19th century), evidence from historical sources suggests that selective breeding was already practiced during Roman times and that several regions had their own domestic chickens with particular characteristics (de Cupere et al., 2005).
The spread of chickens from Asia south- and eastwards is thought to have been initiated by the first farmers, or Austronesians, who spread from mainland China into Island South East Asia around 5000 years ago. With them, they took pottery and agriculture including domestic animals such as pigs and dogs (Bellwood and Dizon, 2006). Although archaeological chicken remains from this region are very scarce, it is assumed that chickens formed part of this agricultural package as well. When the Polynesians subsequently colonized the Pacific island archipelagos, chickens were taken with them. Remains of chickens have been found in archaeological assemblages all over the Pacific region, and on the Hawaiian island Kauai, chickens introduced by the Polynesians some 800 years ago now run wild. Controversial evidence even suggests that the Polynesians brought chickens to South America (Storey et al., 2007) long before Columbus set foot on the continent.
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