Arriving Without Permission

Last week, BTS announced they would not be submitting their new album ARIRANG for Grammy consideration. The reason was debatable but also quite obvious: they hoped their music could be "heard and loved for what it is, rather than being categorized by region or language." The Recording Academy had just created a new Best Asian Pop Music Performance category in June — framed as recognition, but received by many as a fence.

There has been lots of discourse about this on social media. The tension BTS caused isn't new, and it isn't only about music. Western awards institutions have been navigating the same question for decades across every cultural form — and arriving at the same solution: a separate category, a designated box, a place where excellence from other geographies can be acknowledged without disturbing the main event. The question is whether that's recognition or containment. Maybe it's both.

This issue follows that question through film, music, and photography — not to reach a verdict, but to look at the pattern and let it speak for itself. I would love to hear your thoughts.

— Yubin

There is a shot in In the Mood for Love of Maggie Cheung descending a narrow staircase in a cheongsam (or qipao), in slow motion. The shot lasts maybe fifteen seconds. It has been discussed in film schools, replicated in advertising, and referenced in dozens of subsequent films — a single image that entered the visual vocabulary of cinema and stayed forever.

Wong Kar-wai made this film, plus Chungking Express (1994), Fallen Angels (1995), Happy Together (1997), and 2046 (2004) across a decade of filmmaking that critics, directors, and audiences around the world recognized as one of the most distinctive bodies of work in cinema. He won Best Director at Cannes twice. His films have influenced directors from Sofia Coppola to Park Chan-wook to Barry Jenkins. In the Mood for Love appears on the Sight & Sound greatest films poll, the BBC's 100 Greatest Films list, and virtually every serious ranking of world cinema.

But the Academy has never nominated him for anything.

In the Mood for Love is a film about two neighbors — Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung — who discover their spouses are having an affair with each other, and then find themselves drawn together. Nothing explicit happens between them. The film is entirely about what doesn't happen — about longing contained by morality, and feelings expressed through gesture rather than declaration. Set in 1962 Hong Kong, shot in the narrow corridors and cramped apartments, it renders the texture of unspoken emotion with a precision that verbal storytelling alone can’t achieve.

It is one of the most beautiful films ever made. Whether or not this sentence requires a qualifier — "in Asian cinema," "in non-English language cinema," "in world cinema" — is exactly the question we’re asking.

Stream free on Pluto TV (Trailer)

No Other Choice (어쩔수가없다) — Park Chan-wook (Korea, 2025)

The main character Man-su has given twenty-five years to a paper company. He has the house, the family, the corner office — everything the company promised loyalty would earn. Then an American firm buys the paper mill, introduces AI and automation, and Man-su is gone overnight. What Park Chan-wook does with that premise is not what you expect from the director of Oldboy: No Other Choice is a black comedy, following Man-su as he pursues an increasingly deranged plan to eliminate his competition for a new job. Lee Byung-hun plays the character with a desperation so precisely calibrated that it first becomes funny and then stops being funny at a crucial moment. Park has been wanting to adapt Donald Westlake's source novel for nearly two decades; the wait shows in how completely he has made it his own. It received a six-minute standing ovation at Venice, won the People's Choice at Toronto, and was publicly championed by Guillermo Del Toro. The Academy shortlisted it and then left it off the final nominations. Park Chan-wook has been making amazing films for twenty-five years, but he has never received an Oscar nomination. The pattern holds.

Stream on Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime (Trailer)

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (臥虎藏龍) — Ang Lee (Taiwan/Hong Kong, 2000)

Set in Qing Dynasty China, the film follows two master warriors — Chow Yun-fat and Michelle Yeoh — whose decades of unspoken feelings collide with the arrival of a young nobleman's daughter who has stolen a legendary sword and wants nothing more than to be free of the life arranged for her. Ang Lee takes the wuxia genre's defining convention — bodies defying gravity, combat as emotional expression — and turns it into something that operates simultaneously as an action film, a love story, and a meditation on duty and desire. The bamboo forest duel alone is worth the watch. It became the highest-grossing foreign-language film in American box office history at the time of its release, won four Oscars including Best Foreign Language Film, and won Best Director at the Golden Globes, the DGA, and the Independent Spirit Awards — the industry's consensus pick for best-directed film of the year. At the Academy Awards, it lost Best Picture to Gladiator. The audiences had already decided but the ceiling held anyway.

Stream on Amazon Prime, Apple TV (Trailer)

Three non-idol Asian musicians already building global audiences on their own terms — and worth knowing before everyone else catches up.

Fujii Kaze started posting YouTube covers from his bedroom in rural Okayama as a teenager. By 2022, his track Shinunoga E-Wa had gone viral on TikTok across Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Americas — a Japanese-language song about accepting death that somehow became comfort music for millions of people who couldn't understand the full lyrics. He sold out arenas across Asia, signed to Republic Records, and toured globally. Then he made Prema.

His third album is his first recorded entirely in English, named after the Sanskrit word for divine love. The main producer is 250 — the Korean producer whose fingerprints are all over NewJeans' sound, known for grafting nostalgic pop textures onto contemporary production without falling into nostalgia for its own sake. The collaboration is itself a small argument against geography as a creative category: a Japanese artist, a Korean producer, an English album, made in Los Angeles for a global audience. The nine tracks span pop, R&B, funk, and jazz, carried throughout by a voice that can move from a whisper to a falsetto with the ease of someone who has been doing this since he was twelve.

Prema works best as an introduction to an artist whose Japanese-language albums are arguably richer, but this is still a very confident album. Fujii Kaze doesn't sound like he's auditioning for the world stage. He sounds like someone who already knows what he's worth and is simply letting a new audience in on it.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

HEAVYWEIGHT — MILLI (Thailand, 2025)

In April 2022, a nineteen-year-old Thai rapper took the Coachella main stage, performed a song called Mango Sticky Rice, and ate a bowl of the dish mid-set. The moment went viral for obvious reasons — but what got slightly lost in the coverage was how good the music was. MILLI, born Danupha Khanatheerakul, had been releasing sharp, bilingual rap since 2020, blending Thai, English and Isan dialect with a flow that owes as much to Nicki Minaj as to Thailand's own hip hop tradition. HEAVYWEIGHT, her second album, was recorded largely in Los Angeles with international producers and features collaborations with artists from Korea, Japan, and the US — almost entirely in English, with Thai woven in the right places. The BBC named her one of the 100 most influential women in the world in 2022. The Grammys have not yet noticed. She is twenty-two years old.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

WHAT HAVE WE DONE — pH-1 (Korea, 2025)

pH-1 grew up in Long Island, studied biology at Boston College with plans to become a dentist, and ended up in Seoul making hip hop music. His third full-length album is his most personal yet — a genre-fluid record that moves between hip hop, R&B, and pop without losing its thread, built around honest writing and a bilingual ease that feels very natural. His collaborators over the years have included UMI, MILLI (see above), and a rotating cast of Korean and international artists who find their way to H1ghr Music's orbit. WHAT HAVE WE DONE is the sound of someone who has figured out exactly who he is as an artist and stopped explaining himself.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Hefei in China is not the kind of city that appears in photography books. A third-tier industrial city in Anhui province, roughly the size of London but largely unknown outside China, it has no particular claim on the cultural imagination — no iconic skyline, no historic quarter, no obvious reason for a photographer to spend a decade circling the same twenty-kilometer radius of streets with a camera. Liu Tao has been doing exactly that since he first picked one up.

During the day, Liu reads water meters for the local public utility company. After his shift, he puts on his headphones — classical music, sometimes Eminem — and just walks. He shoots for four and a half hours, until eight in the evening, in the same neighborhoods he has been returning to for over a decade. The images that emerge are not documentary in the conventional sense. They are observations: a man sleeping beneath a billboard advertising a luxury apartment he will probably never own; children playing in rubble that used to be something else; a mannequin positioned so precisely against a wall that a passerby appears to be emerging from it; an advertisement for a beauty product placed next to a face that quietly undermines what it promises.

The wit is never cruel. Liu photographs the gap between China's official image of itself — prosperous and modern — and the texture of ordinary life in the places that the image hasn't quite reached. He does it without sentimentality or condescension. He is not a visitor to Hefei; he is a meter reader who knows which street corners catch the light at what hour and which neighbors have stopped looking at his camera.

In 2014, Life Week shared a selection of his images on Weibo. Within twenty-four hours they had been shared forty thousand times. Within a week he was a household name in China, covered by CCTV, offered newspaper jobs and studio contracts that he declined. He went back to reading meters. His work has since been exhibited in Hamburg — where he won the Visual Leader award — and in Japan, the Netherlands, and France. He describes the international recognition with the same composure he brings to everything else: "I experienced a different world, but I still worked on the street."

There are no curators in Liu Tao's story. No gallery that discovered him, no institution that certified him, no category he was placed into. Just a man, a camera, and twenty kilometers of a city that most people drive through without stopping.

Follow his work on IG @grinch1982

Every spring since 812 AD, someone in Kyoto has written down when the cherry blossoms peaked. Emperors, aristocrats, Buddhist monks, government officials — for twelve centuries, the timing of hanami (‘flower viewing’) was recorded in diaries, court documents, and festival registers with quiet consistency. It was never intended as climate science. It became the longest continuous seasonal dataset in human history.

Yasuyuki Aono, a scientist at Osaka Metropolitan University, spent decades digitizing and extending this record, correlating bloom dates with March temperature data to reconstruct historical climate patterns with a margin of error under one degree Celsius. What the data shows is striking in its clarity: for roughly a thousand years, from 812 to around 1800, peak bloom dates clustered around mid-April with natural variation but no directional trend. Then, as Kyoto urbanized and industrialization began warming the planet, the dates started moving. Earlier, and earlier, and earlier. In 2021, the cherry blossoms peaked on March 26 — the earliest date in 1,200 years of records, nearly three weeks ahead of the historic average. 

The data is also a portrait of the people who kept it. For a millennium, hanami was a ritual of the Japanese court — aristocrats composing poetry beneath the blossoms, the bloom date a matter of aesthetic and social significance. Later it passed to monks, to city officials, to a modern scientist who tracked the same trees in his final months before dying of cancer in August 2025. His passing left the record without a custodian, and a global appeal followed. Earlier this year, a new keeper was appointed. 

The cherry blossom has always carried in Japanese culture the weight of impermanence — the beauty of something that arrives briefly and cannot be held. Twelve centuries of careful observation have turned that cultural intuition into data. The blossoms are arriving earlier every decade. The record continues.

Oblique is a weekly letter for people who discover culture sideways. obliquemag.com