Nothing Promised, Nothing Postponed

Three unrelated news stuck with me this week: a plane crash in Florida that killed nine people, a professional soccer player in Spain who collided with another player on the field and never got up, and a Korean travel YouTuber cycling through Bolivia who was hit by a truck. Different countries and different causes, but each person was young, healthy, and doing what they loved the moment it ended tragically and suddenly. May all the souls rest in peace.

Maybe it’s an obvious thought, but these stories reminded me once again that life is precious and doesn't always wait for a convenient moment to end. As the phrase ‘carpe diem’ suggests, we should seize the day and live it to the fullest. This issue's Film section follows that thread in a few different directions, not necessarily through grief, but through people who figured out how to start doing the things they love and cherish instead of postponing them.

Music, this time, is a smaller detour: a few records where an Asian musician and a Western one built something together from scratch and ended up creating beautiful music. They all turned out to be jazz and classical, which suits the season fine.

— Yubin

The main character Hirayama cleans public toilets in Tokyo for a living, and the film spends most of its running time simply watching him do it over and over again. He wakes before his alarm, waters the same seedlings, drives to work listening to cassette tapes (Lou Reed, Otis Redding, the Rolling Stones), photographs the same tree through the same gap in its leaves, and ends most nights at the same underground bar. Kōji Yakusho, who won Best Actor at Cannes for the role, plays Hirayama as someone whose contentment isn't necessarily passive. He observes things with purpose: the way light falls through a window, a stranger's offhand kindness, the specific moment a song ends. 

Wenders, the legendary German film director, working from a real public works project (Tokyo commissioned well-known architects to redesign the city's public toilets, and the film was originally conceived as a kind of extended advertisement for it), doesn’t try to explain Hirayama and his actions. We get glimpses of his surroundings and relationships: a niece who runs away from home and turns up at his apartment, a brief encounter with his estranged sister that reveals he comes from money he chose to walk away from.The film never resolves why and just lets the viewers observe his quiet life.

Wenders worked entirely in Japanese with a Japanese cast, and made sure that the film's tone matched its subject: no grand statement about mortality, just a camera patiently watching someone live well.

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

Past Lives — Celine Song (Korea/USA, 2023)

There are two childhood friends, Na Young and Hae Sung. Na Young leaves Seoul at 12, changes her name to Nora, and becomes a playwright in New York. Hae Sung stays and becomes an engineer who occasionally wonders about Na Young. When he visits New York 24 years later, the film doesn't turn into an affair or a crisis. It just lets the two of them, and Nora's husband Arthur, sit with every unlived version of their lives for one long evening. Celine Song's debut leans on the Korean idea of in-yun, a kind of accumulated fate built from small, repeated contact across lifetimes, and earned Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Nothing here is sudden or tragic. It's just time, doing what time does.

Stream on Prime Video, Fandango, Rakuten Viki (Trailer)

The Farewell — Lulu Wang (China/USA, 2019)

Nai Nai, a grandmother living in China, has months to live and doesn't know it. Her family does however, and by an old practice that's still common in China, they decide not to tell her, gathering everyone under the cover of a hastily arranged wedding so they can say goodbye without her ever finding out she's dying. Lulu Wang built the film from her own family's real story (she first told it on This American Life), and shoots it as warm comedy as much as grief. Awkwafina, in a rare dramatic role, won a Golden Globe for it. It's the one pick here that does involve someone’s passing, but the actual thesis is the opposite of a eulogy: show up now, while they’re still there to be shown up for.

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

In 1965, a young American composer in his mid-twenties took a job transcribing music for a film called Chappaqua. The composer was Philip Glass, fresh out of Juilliard; the music belonged to Ravi Shankar, who had written the film's score. Glass has said the work reshaped how he thought about composition entirely: Indian classical music taught him that rhythm, not harmony, could be the actual foundation of a piece, an idea that became the engine of his own minimalism.

They didn't record together until 25 years later. By then Glass was one of the most recognized composers alive and Shankar was the man who'd already introduced several generations of Western listeners to the sitar, and Indian traditional string instrument. Passages isn't a guest-feature record. Each composer wrote a set of themes, then handed them to the other to arrange and orchestrate, so every track carries both of their fingerprints. Hindustani classical structure runs through Glass's repetitive, mechanical builds, and Glass's harmonic language runs through Shankar's melodic lines. It peaked at No. 3 on Billboard's World Music chart and drew a 7.5 from Pitchfork decades after release, an evidence that the record stands the test of time.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Duet — Chick Corea & Hiromi (2007)

Two pianos, one stage, no backing band. Duet is exactly what it sounds like: a live, two-disc document of two of the greatest contemporary jazz pianists Chick Corea and Hiromi Uehara trading and tangling lines in real time. Corea had championed Hiromi earlier in her career, and by the time of this recording, the dynamic had shifted from mentor and student toward something closer to two equally serious players testing each other. There's no forced concept, no theme, just two people who are very good at the same instrument and creating something beautiful together with respect.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Hush — Yo-Yo Ma & Bobby McFerrin (1992)

McFerrin sings on Hush in his famously improvisational and fluid style, pairing his voice with Ma's cello across three Bach adaptations and five of McFerrin's own compositions. It's a genuine 50/50 collaboration record rather than a classical star borrowing a vocalist for color. Contemporary reviews were mixed (some of McFerrin's writing was dismissed at the time as overly New Age), but the better moments, particularly "Stars," hold up as a real conversation between two very different instruments that is worth listening to.

Stream on Spotify and Apple Music

Zhong Lin grew up in Alor Setar, Malaysia, raised between an English-educated father and a Chinese-educated mother, consuming Hollywood movies, Japanese manga, Indian music, and Malaysian food. She studied advertising in Kuala Lumpur and taught herself photography afterward, eventually building a career shooting for British Vogue, Vanity Fair, Vogue Italia, i-D, and GQ China, alongside campaigns for Nike, Puma, and SK-II. 

In April 2020, COVID travel restrictions stranded her in Taipei. Rather than wait it out, she gave herself a rule: one new image, shot and posted the same day, every day, for a full year. No archive pulls, no backlog, no days off. The resulting Project 365 is built almost entirely from physical craft rather than digital trickery. Specific entries have become small cult favorites on their own: "Snail Girl" (day 250), which nods to Junji Ito's Tomie, and "Couch Potato" (day 332), referencing Ito's take on The Human Chair. Day 27 is water droplets built by hand across a model's face. Day 325 submerges a subject alongside live goldfish. The project ended, as planned, exactly 365 days later, with a final shoot on Baishawan beach.

It's a genuine stretch from the documentary and street photography Oblique usually runs in this slot, and closer to fashion surrealism than anything resembling a candid moment. But the discipline underneath it is the real subject. A year of forced, same-day, no-safety-net output is a different kind of test than a single striking shoot, and it's what got her nominated for Vogue Italia's "Ones to Watch" and named to the BoF500. 

Follow her work on IG @zhonglin_

At Christie's Hong Kong's autumn sales this year, a 12th-century gilt-bronze figure of the bodhisattva Manjushri sold for HK$137.35 million, more than double its estimate and a new world auction record for Himalayan gilt-bronze sculpture. The whole week of sales closed at HK$1.02 billion, the category's best result in eight years, with hammer prices averaging 111% above low estimates. The detail that makes this more than an auction-house press release: Millennial and Gen-Z buyers made up more than half of the season's new collectors. Sotheby's reports the same generational shift globally; that age group has grown from about a quarter to more than a third of all Asian art bidders since 2022, and spent twice as much in 2025 as in 2021. 

The obvious assumption would be that a generation raised on digital speed wants digital things. Sotheby's specialist Nicolas Chow argues the opposite is happening: antiquities can be touched and used, demand real research rather than hype, and in his words, "the real luxury for people will be taking the time to slow down." Zhaobo Yang, a 29-year-old London sculptor, put that into practice this spring, buying his first Chinese antiquity, a Qing dynasty bronze incense burner, for £1,000, after five years of studying the category before he pulled the trigger. He's being careful on purpose. With antiquities, there's no quick way to tell what's real.

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