Initially intrigued by how a camera could extend my eyes, I took up photography as a leisure activity around 2008 when I bought my first digital single lens reflex camera. With pictures taken locally and during trips to various regions around the world, I have been trying to tell photographic stories in the form of …
There’s a popular Chinese saying 刻舟求剑 kezhou qiujian. Literally meaning ‘there is mark on the boat where the sword fell’, it derives from an ancient fable in which two people are travelling across a lake in a small boat and one loses his sword overboard. The other responds that it is no problem because he …
Everybody has a story to tell, and listening to other people’s well-crafted stories can help to make the world a better place. This is the driving philosophy of the international digital storytelling movement. Digital storytelling describes a particular storytelling method that was pioneered and refined by the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkeley, California in …
The image of an entrepreneur these days is often someone working in the Internet or mobile media, bringing together social networks to exploit e-commerce: think of the founders of Facebook, Cyworld in Korea or Tencent in China. The concept of ‘hackerspaces’ on the other hand does not conjure up the Schumpertian ideal of the entrepreneur, …
Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television by Ying Zhu. The New Press, New York For most people CCTV is associated with surveillance cameras. However, for people living in China CCTV is the English acronym of China Central Television (zhongyang dianshitai), the broadcasting monolith that has dominated life since the late 1970s (it …
Why has Japanese popular culture had such a tremendous impact on Asian youth? The answer is sometimes described in three words: Gross National Cool (GNC). While national power is often quantified in national income and expressed as gross domestic product (GDP) or gross national product (GNP), Gross National Cool is an index of Japan’s influence …
International companies contemplating a media venture in China might consider Beijing a difficult place to work; after all it is the political capital of China and the home of thousands of party officials. As the basecamp of the Chinese Communist Party, Beijing is also the headquarters of all media regulatory agencies. It is unquestionably a …
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a short story written by the American author F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was made into an Oscar nominated movie several years ago starring Brad Pitt and Kate Blanchett. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was a story about aging, something that everyone is confronted with whether we like …
In May 2009 I was in China conducting interviews for a book on cultural and creative clusters when I met Zhang Changcheng 张长城. Mr Zhang is a forty year old social entrepreneur who wears his hair long and dresses casually. He is better known by friends and acquaintances as ‘Great Wall’ [this is his actual …
The rise of Korean soft power – the Korean Wave or Hallyu – has steadily gained momentum since the late 1990s, driven by consumption of Korean popular culture among diverse audiences throughout East Asia and beyond. Meanwhile, the attraction of Korean TV dramas, pop music (aka K-Pop) and cinema, as well as an admiration for …