Making the Story Visible

Two things happened in the world of culture this past week. The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art finally opened in Los Angeles (17 years of planning, 8 years of construction), a new institution in Exposition Park built entirely around visual storytelling, illustration and comic art. And on America's Got Talent S21, a nineteen-year-old singer from Thailand named Nene Royal won the whole competition, becoming the first Thai act to take the title.

These two unrelated events gave me inspiration for this week's Film and Music sections. Film follows the idea of narrative art across manga, ukiyo-e, and Peking opera. Music looks at three other talent-show winners from Asia who built real careers once the show moved on.

I hope you can also get inspiration from the events around you that will give you ideas about what to watch, read or listen to this weekend. If you don’t, you can start from the list here.

— Yubin

Tatsuki Fujimoto's one-shot manga Look Back has now been adapted twice within two years, first as a widely admired 2024 animated feature, then, this September, as a live-action film directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda. Kore-eda has said he found the manga by chance in a Tokyo train station, read it in a single sitting, and felt what he called "the desperate resolve behind this work," the recognition of one working artist seeing another.

The story follows Fujino, a popular grade-school manga artist, and Kyomoto, a reclusive classmate who draws far better than she does. What starts as rivalry becomes a real creative partnership, one that eventually survives the two going their separate ways, until something tragic happens to Kyomoto and Fujino is left to decide what the work was ever for. Natsuki Deguchi and Aju Makita play the adult versions of Fujino and Kyomoto, with Furi Nanase and Rokka Okada as their younger selves, shot largely in Nikaho City on Japan's northwest coast.

Kore-eda's version leans harder into the third act's tragedy than the animated film did, giving the audience less room to look away from it, and at one point folds an actual passage of hand-drawn animation directly into the live-action frame, which acts as a window into Fujino's head. Cinematographer Senzo Ueno tracks the story's seasons through migrating swans and shifting light, while the sound design, pencils scratching paper, the wet sound of paint being mixed, does as much emotional work as any spoken words.

The film premiered in competition at Venice in September 2026, and GKIDS will bring it to US, UK, and Irish theaters later this year. It is a clear demonstration of the Lucas Museum's founding argument: the same story, born on a comic page, can carry just as much weight on a screen or any other visual medium.

Watch in theaters via GKIDS, US release later in 2026 (Trailer)

Miss Hokusai (百日紅) — Keiichi Hara (Japan, 2015)

Katsushika Hokusai made The Great Wave, one of the most reproduced images in art history, but Miss Hokusai isn't really about him. Adapted from Hinako Sugiura's manga, it follows his daughter O-Ei, a gifted painter working quietly inside her father's studio in 1814 Edo, ghost-finishing commissions that went out under his name while running the household and looking after her blind younger sister. Keiichi Hara builds the film as a loose string of episodes rather than a single plot, and never gives O-Ei a moment where she gets the credit she deserves. The film won the Jury Award at Annecy and swept three prizes at Fantasia, including Best Animated Feature, a recognition that finally arrived (two centuries later) to give the artist the proper credit she deserves, even through a depiction of her life in another art form.

Stream on Prime Video, Apple TV, YouTube (Trailer)

Farewell My Concubine (霸王別姬) — Chen Kaige (China, 1993)

Two boys train together at a brutal Peking opera academy in the 1920s and spend the next fifty years bound to the roles they were cast in as children: Duan Xiaolou as the warrior king, Cheng Dieyi as the concubine who dies for him. Chen Kaige follows them through warlord rule, Japanese occupation, civil war, and the Cultural Revolution. Peking opera itself, its stylized gender roles, its painted faces, and its total demand on a performer's identity, becomes the lens for how people survive when history keeps rewriting the parts they're allowed to play. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1993, the first Chinese-language film to win it, and Chinese authorities briefly banned it at home before permitting a cut re-release. Three decades on, it remains one of the clear examples of how a traditional performing art can sustain and carry a meaning for a century.

Stream on Prime Video, Roku, MUBI (Trailer)

In 2012, Roy Kim won Superstar-K 4, South Korea's biggest television audition show, beating out roughly two million other applicants for the title. He was twenty, still enrolled at Georgetown University, and had built a modest following on the show mostly by playing acoustic guitar and covering songs quietly rather than shouting anything. The following June, he released Love Love Love, his debut studio album, and the record made the case that his win wasn't a fluke.

The lead single "Bom Bom Bom" spent two weeks at number one on Korea's Gaon chart and three weeks atop Billboard's K-pop Hot 100, while the title track followed it into the top five on both charts. The album itself is unfussy acoustic pop, mostly just guitar, voice, and a light backing arrangement, built around Kim's plainspoken tenor rather than any vocal fireworks. It won him Best New Male Artist at the Mnet Asian Music Awards and Rookie of the Year at the Golden Disc Awards the following year, official confirmation that a talent-show win could translate into an actual recording career rather than a one-season novelty.

Kim has kept releasing music steadily since, through a mandatory stint in the Korean military that took him off stages between 2020 and 2021, and has sold more than 12 million digital downloads in South Korea to date. None of that started with a viral moment or an algorithm. It started with an audition, two genuinely good songs, and an unglamorous discipline about writing simple things well.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Dami Im — Dami Im (Korea/Australia, 2013)

Dami Im moved from Seoul to Brisbane at nine years old, and by the time she won the fifth season of The X Factor Australia in 2013, she'd already released one independent album that went nowhere near a chart. Her self-titled follow-up, released weeks after the win, went straight to number one on the ARIA Albums Chart and was certified platinum, making her the first X Factor Australia winner to follow a number-one single with a number-one album. She'd go on to represent Australia at Eurovision three years later, finishing runner-up. This album contains many covers she performed on X Factor. Start with “Purple Rain”. She does the original song justice.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Just as I Am — Guy Sebastian (Malaysia/Australia, 2003)

Guy Sebastian was born in Klang, Malaysia, before his family moved to Adelaide, and he won the first-ever season of Australian Idol in 2003. The country responded by buying 164K copies of his debut album, Just as I Am, in its first week alone. Two singles from it, "Angels Brought Me Here" and "All I Need Is You," both went to number one, with "Angels" becoming the best-selling single in Australia that year. The album has since gone six times platinum. More than twenty years and over a dozen albums later, Sebastian is still one of Australia's most consistently charting artists, proof that a debut this large doesn't have to be the peak.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

For his Diorama Map series, Sohei Nishino spends weeks on foot in a city with only a film camera, climbing into buildings for elevated views, riding rivers and canals when a street won't get him close enough, shooting constantly and without much of a plan beyond following his own curiosity. Tokyo, the city he has returned to most often, produced hundreds of black-and-white negatives before Nishino ever sat down to make sense of them.

This is where the real work happens. Back in the studio, he hand-collages the individual prints into a single sprawling composite, arranged not by GPS accuracy but by the geography of memory: how the walk actually felt, which turns stuck, which corners blurred together. The finished map is then rephotographed flat, so what looks from a distance like an aerial survey is, up close, an assembly of a thousand small, specific, ground-level moments, stitched into something that resembles cubism.

Nishino has said a photograph only becomes complete in the process of recollecting it, which is a fairly precise description of what Diorama Map actually does to a viewer. You don't take in the whole image at once. You wander it the way he wandered the city, one neighborhood at a time. His Tokyo work was collected in a 2015 photobook published by IMA Books. Definitely worth checking out.

Follow his work on his website and IG @sohei_nishino

Ma Yansong was born in Beijing in 1975 and went to Yale for a master's degree, where his thesis, "Floating Islands," imagined skyscrapers rising out of Manhattan's East River. He founded MAD Architects in 2004, becoming the first Chinese architect to design a major building outside China when his firm's Absolute Towers, a pair of curved residential skyscrapers in Mississauga, Ontario, quickly earned the nickname "Marilyn Monroe Towers" for their twisting profile. He has since built the Harbin Opera House, a wave of white curves rising out of a wetland park in northern China, and the Ordos Museum, a metallic shape that looks dropped into the Mongolian desert from somewhere else.

What runs through all of it is a philosophy Ma calls "Shanshui City," borrowing a term from the scientist Qian Xuesen and building on it with his own philosophy: that a city's buildings should behave like landscape, like mountains and water, rather than like machines stacked on top of each other. It is, by his own account, a rejection of the glass-box modernism that most large architecture firms still default to.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, which opened in Exposition Park on September 22, 2026, is the fullest expression of that idea he has built yet. The 300,000-square-foot building is wrapped in more than 1,200 curved fiber-reinforced plastic panels, engineered with the firm Stantec to form a single continuous, cloud-like shape with no straight edges anywhere on its exterior. It is a building about storytelling that refuses to look like a container. George Lucas spent over a decade trying to give his comic art and film memorabilia a permanent home; Ma gave him a building that argues architecture is itself just another way of telling a story.

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