Life Style

The 19th Hong Kong Arts Development Awards were held at Hong Kong City Hall on June 10, organised by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (HKADC). This annual event acknowledges achievements in many categories, but as an art critic, I was watching the visual arts prizes closely.The artist of the year award (visual arts) went to Enoch Cheng Tak-yan, while the young artist award (visual arts) went to Dony Cheng Hung. Cash prizes of HK$50,000 (US$6,400) and HK$25,000 respectively were awarded.Cross-disciplinary artist-curator Enoch Cheng has fingers in many pies. He was the curator of gallery programmes at the Hong Kong art fair Art Central in March, and in 2024, he directed and translated the play Jerome Bel at the Hong Kong Arts Festival.Inspired by French dancer and choreographer Jérôme ...

This is the 65th instalment in a series on dementia, including the research into its causes and treatment, advice for carers, and stories of hope.My mother taught me to swim in a pool that was going green with algae. My memory of the day is much clearer than the water was. She urged me to leap from the side into her arms – and I did.She thought I ought to know how to swim, even though she herself hated it.I – like my maternal grandmother, who swam regularly into her eighties – grew to love it. Ever since I learned how, I have sought out places in which to swim, from pools to lakes and the sea.The writer as a child in a swimming pool with her maternal grandmother, who still swam regularly into her eighties. Photo: Anthea RowanPeople often ask why I love swimming. “You just go up and down,” ...

Lead cast: Seohyun, Ok Taec-yeonLatest Nielsen rating: 3.3 per centK-drama formulas can be pretty rigid, but for many viewers, it is precisely the comforting sense of familiarity that they offer that keeps them coming back for more. This also applies to the popular webtoons and web novels that many of these shows are based on and their readers.The fantasy drama The First Night with the Duke begins with just such a reader, a nameless college student – played by Seohyun from K-pop group Girls’ Generation – who loves to lose herself in her favourite period romance, the tawdry and clichéd webtoon Lord Tyrant’s Obsessive Love.When the webtoon announces it will go on hiatus, the woman lambasts the writer during a drunken comment rampage before falling over and knocking her head just as the write...

A group of current and former Oxford University students have become an online sensation after a Bollywood-style video shot around the prestigious British campus went viral.The performance involving about seven friends was shot to Desi Boyz, the title track of the 2011 romantic comedy of the same name starring Akshay Kumar, John Abraham, Deepika Padukone and Chitrangada Singh.The idea for the clip came from Druv Punjabi, an Oxford alumnus who was born and raised in Hong Kong.“This is something I had wanted to do for a long time,” says Punjabi by phone from Dubai, where he is now based.“We really wanted to show off Oxford and the surrounding cityscape, so when the university said they were keen to collaborate it came as a bit of a shock.”Another shock was to follow, with the video blowing u...

Interactions between China and the Islamic world began more than 1,400 years ago during the Tang dynasty (618-907), facilitated by maritime trade routes that linked the Persian Gulf to Chinese ports such as Quanzhou and Guangzhou.Evidence of these ancient cultural exchanges survives in artefacts that blend different artistic traditions.Some of these items, including imperial carpets, ceramics, metalwork, manuscripts and jade carvings, are on show in a new exhibition at the Hong Kong Palace Museum (HKPM), in the West Kowloon Cultural District.“Wonders of Imperial Carpets” is the result of a collaboration between HKPM and the Museum of Islamic Art (MIA) in Doha, Qatar. The exhibition features around 100 items from MIA alongside objects from the HKPM and the Palace Museum Beijing.A luxurious ...

Most people in Hong Kong who grew up in the 1980s and ’90s would have listened to some measure of Cantopop, but they were not the only ones to do so – the Cantopop stars of that time had fans all over the world.A new exhibition at the Chinese Canadian Museum in Vancouver, Canada, highlights how migration played a major role in the far-reaching influence of these stars – some of whom also sang in Mandarin.“We actually have a whole list of 100 singers who have some kind of Canadian tie,” said museum CEO Melissa Karmen Lee at the launch of “Dream Factory: Cantopop Mandopop 1980s-2000”.The exhibition examines how these stars, as well as other generations of Asian singers, continue to influence Chinese immigrants and their descendants in Canada through music and fashion.Melissa Karmen Lee, CEO ...

On June 26, British chef Kirk Westaway – best known for his modern British cuisine at two-Michelin-star Jaan in Singapore – will open The Crown by Kirk Westaway at the Fairmont Jakarta hotel in the Indonesian capital.It signals a growing appetite for refined, chef-led dining in the Indonesian metropolis.“Jakarta’s dining scene is evolving fast – there is so much energy, and the city is full of food lovers who are genuinely keen to explore new experiences,” says Westaway. “For me, it felt like the right time to bring something different to the table.“With a growing audience of well-travelled, food-savvy diners, this seems like the perfect moment to be part of the city’s culinary momentum,” he adds.In recent years, Jakarta’s dining scene has undergone a transformation.What was once a landsca...

For “alternative K-pop” collective Balming Tiger, “having fun” is what matters most. That is why the group is returning to Hong Kong – its members fondly recall how the enthusiastic crowd pelted them with “shoes and slippers” during their first performance in the city at the 2023 Clockenflap Music and Arts Festival.“The energy that Hong Kong people brought to the festival was something else. They were hyped and going crazy,” says frontman and rapper Omega Sapien. “Usually, we get that when we’re in the US or Europe, not in Asia [where] it’s calmer. I really loved the energy there. It was quite unforgettable.”Balming Tiger brought out a wild side of Hong Kong two years ago but has been loved worldwide since June 2018, when the group debuted the single “I’m Sick”. Its energetic music video w...

Hong Kong filmmaker Wai Ka-fai made his name when he co-founded Milkyway Image with Johnnie To Kei-fung and went about producing, writing, directing or co-directing innovative genre takes like The Odd One Dies, which made the company internationally famous in the late 1990s.For quite some time, Wai kept himself in the background, leaving the ebullient To as the face of the company. But his creative input was never in doubt.Here we look at Wai’s first three films as director.1. Peace Hotel (1995)Made before he joined forces with To, Wai’s debut feature was an atmospheric action film produced by John Woo Yu-sum.The unabashed “Eastern Western” was Chow Yun-fat’s last Hong Kong film before he moved to Hollywood, and intriguingly, Chow is credited alongside Wai for Peace Hotel’s story.Set in an...

American biohacker Bryan Johnson invests big money – an estimated US$2 million yearly – trying to turn back his body clock. His quest for eternal youth includes specialised nutrition, supplements and personalised medicine – from stem-cell injections to DNA editing.You do not have to be rich or a risk-taker to slow the ageing process, though. There are more accessible options that are a lot less costly, and may be even more successful, as two British authors reveal in books that describe how they cut decades from their biological age.Chronological vs biological ageEssentially, your chronological age is how long you have lived; your biological age is how old your cells and organs are. Johnson, for example, is 47, but reportedly has the heart function of a 37-year-old and the fitness level of...