Connected, From a Distance

There's a particular kind of strangeness that comes not from being too far away, but from being just far enough. This week I traveled from Seattle to Montréal and Québec — still the same continent, and yet, I felt like a stranger at times wandering through the old streets along the Saint-Lawrence River. The cobblestones, the French signage, the particular kind of light over the river… My memories of studying in France came back, not as nostalgia exactly, but as a reminder that certain places have a way of transporting you back in time.

This issue is for anyone who has felt that particular displacement. The feeling of being present somewhere that is not quite yours, and yet finding sometimes that the distance is exactly what makes memories and connections possible. The films, records and other cultural pieces that I present to you in this issue all share this common thread. I hope you’ll get to enjoy and appreciate them as much as I did when I first found them.

— Yubin

Late Autumn is the fourth telling of the same story: a 1966 Korean melodrama originally, remade three times before Kim Tae-yong got to it in 2010. But his version does something none of the others tried — it leaves Korea entirely. Anna, a Chinese immigrant on a three-day prison furlough to attend her mother's funeral, takes a Greyhound bus into Seattle. On board, she meets Hoon, a Korean escort on the run from an angry client's husband. Both speak English to each other, a language native to neither of them, simply because it's the only one they share.

That's the quiet thesis of the film. Kim relocates a Korean story to American territory not to target a Western audience, but because displacement is the point. Anna and Hoon are connected by a common feeling of being alien in a country right from the start. Seattle's fog does the same work that a more conventional film would assign to dialogue. The city is gray, hushed, and largely indifferent to them, but it ironically provides a warm environment for the characters to build their connections in (at least that’s my biased interpretation of the city).

It is a slow film — some critics found it too restrained, the actors' unease with English seen by some as stiffness rather than honesty. But their performance is remarkable nonetheless. Tang Wei and Hyun Bin are playing two people approaching each other in a borrowed language, in a borrowed country, for three days that both know cannot last. The film became, somewhat unexpectedly, the highest-grossing Korean release in Chinese box office history at the time — proof that a story this quiet could still travel far.

Stream on Netflix, in select countries (Trailer)

Asian directors, foreign cities, and the connections that distance makes possible.

Calmi Cuori Appassionati (冷静と情熱のあいだ ) — Isamu Nakae (Japan, 2001)

In Italian, the title means Calm, Passionate Hearts. Junsei, a Japanese art restoration student living in Florence, has built a life there but never managed to forget Aoi, a Chinese-Japanese woman he loved and lost to a misunderstanding years earlier in Tokyo. When he learns she is in Milan — with someone else, living a different life — the film takes its turn. Based on a pair of interlocking bestselling novels, the film was among the highest-grossing releases in Japan in 2001; Kelly Chen and Yutaka Takenouchi bring warmth to a film that could feel cold and distant. A quiet note: the soundtrack composed by Ryo Yoshimata is worth seeking out on its own terms. The Whole Nine Yards is one of the most beautiful film scores I’ve ever heard.

Stream on YouTube, Netflix and Apple TV, in select countries (Trailer)

Pushing Hands (推手) — Ang Lee (Taiwan, 1991)

The great Ang Lee's debut feature was also the first Taiwanese film ever shot entirely in the United States. Mr. Chu, a retired Tai Chi master from Beijing, arrives in upstate New York to live with his Americanised son and his American daughter-in-law. He speaks no English. She speaks no Mandarin. The film's gentle comedy comes from this impasse; its deeper sadness comes from what the impasse reveals about his son, caught between two people he loves and two lives he is trying to hold together. But the connection that saves Mr. Chu isn't with his family — it's with Mrs. Chen, another older Chinese immigrant he meets at a community center. Lee would return to the same theme two more times — The Wedding Banquet (1993) and Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) complete what later becomes known as his ‘Father Knows Best’ trilogy, each one circling the same question of what remains of home after you leave it.

Stream on Tubi, Roku, Plex for free (Trailer)

The title isn't a room number. 201 is the area code for northern New Jersey — the geography of someone who left Seoul at twelve, grew up between the two countries, and named his debut record after the one he couldn't quite call home.

Jo Hyu-il recorded 201 alone in a small room in Flushing, New York, doing everything himself: writing, arranging, playing every instrument, engineering the sound. The lo-fi texture wasn't just a style choice — this was music made in the margins of a life lived between languages, with a microphone and whatever was in the room. What came out sounded like nothing else in the Korean indie scene at the time, because Jo had grown up almost entirely outside it. His references were American — garage rock, Weezer, MTV — but the language was Korean, and the emotional register was something that didn't map cleanly onto either tradition.

That untranslatable character is the album's defining feature. Antifreeze is a love song on the surface, but its real subject is the specific loneliness of a New York winter when you're not quite from anywhere. 좋아해줘 asks to be loved without conditions — a line that reads differently when you understand it was written by someone who had spent years being a stranger. Even the Korean is slightly off, carrying the particular cadence of someone who learned the language at a distance, which Korean listeners found not alienating but strangely intimate.

201 won Best Modern Rock Album at the 2010 Korean Music Awards and has since settled into the category of modern classic — a record that Korean indie musicians cite the way American musicians cite the first Velvet Underground album: not necessarily something everyone heard at the time, but something that changed what seemed possible. Its origin story is inseparable from its sound. This is what it sounds like when someone makes a Korean album in a New Jersey area code.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Two more records made — or discovered — at a distance from home.

Lee Sora (이소라) — 7th Album (Korea, 2008)

The album has no title. Its thirteen tracks are listed only by number — Track 1 through Track 13 — and the back cover carries hand-drawn illustrations in place of a tracklist. Lee Sora conceived and largely wrote the album while staying in isolation at Lake Tahoe, on the Nevada-California border, where she had retreated after burning out completely in Seoul. She listened to demo instrumentals emailed from collaborators back in Korea, played on repeat in a quiet rented house by the water, and wrote down whatever surfaced — not forcing the lyrics out but waiting for them, walking the shoreline until the words came. She recorded her vocals back in Korea, but the emotional register of the album belongs to the lake. The decision to strip away the titles was made afterward: naming the songs would have reduced to words what the lake and the distance from Seoul had made possible.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Shugo Tokumaru (トクマルシューゴ) — Night Piece (Japan, 2004)

Shugo Tokumaru recorded Night Piece alone in his bedroom in Tokyo, playing every instrument himself — ukuleles, glockenspiels, wind chimes, lo-fi guitar — across ten tracks that rarely exceed two minutes. What happened next is the part that earns its place here: the album debuted not in Japan but in the United States, released by a small New York independent label after a demo CD found its way there through a chain of chance encounters. Japan heard it months later. If 201 is the sound of someone building an identity between two worlds, and Lee Sora's 7th is the sound of retreating from one entirely, Night Piece is something stranger: a record that found its home somewhere its maker didn’t even expect. Disclaimer — this is not easy listening. It is quiet, unhurried, and slightly out of time. But put on headphones and give it the patience it needs, and something will open up.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Chien-Chi Chang is one of the few Asian photographers to hold full membership in Magnum Photos — the cooperative that has defined the standard for documentary photography since Henri Cartier-Bresson helped found it in 1947. Born in Taichung, Taiwan, Chang joined in 1995 and became a full member in 2001, after work that had already appeared in the New Yorker, National Geographic, and Time, and won him the Visa d'Or — the highest prize in photojournalism. 

Chang began working his way into New York's Chinatown in 1992 with no guaranteed access. The men he wanted to photograph — undocumented workers from Fujian province, packed into subdivided apartments, working as dishwashers and cooks and day laborers — had no reason to trust a Taiwanese photographer with a camera. He ate with them, slept on their floors, helped them navigate English-language forms and phone calls. It took years before they let him photograph.

What emerged over two decades is one of the most quietly powerful bodies of work in contemporary documentary photography. Chang shot the men in New York in black and white — the grey tones of a life lived in borrowed rooms, in a city that would never quite be home. Then he traveled to Fujian to photograph their wives and children, and shot those images in color. This formal decision carries the entire objective: two halves of the same life, rendered in irreconcilable registers. You cannot put the two worlds on the same film.

The series is not about immigration in the way that the word usually gets used. It is about the specific texture of separation: the men who left, and the families who stayed, and the strange present tense that both live and endure while the other is away. Chang, who began his own career at the Seattle Times and has split his life between Taiwan and Austria for decades, photographed this not from the outside but from inside the divided experience. That quality gives Chinatown its particular stillness. These are not photographs of people being looked at. They are photographs of people who allowed themselves to be seen.

Chinatown was exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the International Center of Photography in New York. Check out Chang’s IG account.

There is a version of the airport that most of us know well: fluorescent lighting, overpriced sandwiches, gates designed to move you through as efficiently as possible. The airport as waiting room. The airport as necessary interruption between the place you left and the place you're going to.

Asia builds airports differently.

For the thirteenth consecutive year, Singapore's Changi Airport has been named the world's best by Skytrax, the independent aviation survey firm that polls over 100 nationalities of passengers annually. The top four airports in the 2025 rankings are Changi, Hamad International in Doha, Tokyo Haneda, and Seoul Incheon — all four Asian. Hong Kong International ranks sixth, making it five of the top six. The pattern has held for so long it barely registers as news anymore, which is precisely why it's worth pausing on.

What these airports share is a design philosophy that Western airports have largely not adopted: the idea that transit itself is worth inhabiting. Changi has an indoor waterfall seven storeys tall, a butterfly garden, a rooftop swimming pool, and free movie theatres. Incheon offers live traditional Korean cultural performances in the terminal and a spa. Both are designed not to minimize your awareness of being in an airport, but to make being in an airport something you might actually enjoy. 

This is not accidental, and it is not mere competition. It reflects something deeper about how these cities — Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong — understand the role of infrastructure in cultural identity. An airport is the first and last thing a visitor experiences of a place. For these cities, that moment is worth taking seriously. The result is that their airports have quietly become one of Asia's most successful cultural exports: a model of what public space can be when it's designed around the person inside it rather than the logistics around them.

Western airports have started noticing. Terminal renovations at JFK, Heathrow, and Charles de Gaulle have all taken cues from the Changi model in recent years — more retail, more dining, more light. But gesture is not philosophy. The difference between an airport that adds a waterfall and an airport that was conceived from the beginning as a place worth being is the difference between a waiting room with better furniture and one that at the level of design intention cares about your time in it.

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