Celebrity Life

We take a look at some zodiac-inspired high jewellery, perfect for winter this year.

Our long-established fascination with the stars has led us to some celestial fine jewels and more...

Van Cleef & Arpels: Zodiaque Collection

The new Zodiaque collection from Van Cleef & Arpels draws inspiration from two of the Maison's most cherished inspirations, nature and astronomy. It also references the coloured pendants from the 1970s. The 12 long necklaces in the collection reinterpret the signs of the Zodiac, with motifs adorning both sides of the medallions in gold and rare ornamental stone.

Jessie V E: Constellation collection

Jessie V E first designed her Constellation collection back in 2014. It’s been a bestseller since then — no small wonder, given that our fascination with the heavens dates back millennia. The designs are delicate, featuring rings, glittering necklaces and little hoop earrings dotted with your choice of star sign, which makes them great for giving, either for yourself or loved ones.

Chanel: Escale à Venise collection

Paying homage to the lion — both as a symbol of power and Gabrielle Chanel’s astrological sign — the new Escale à Venise high jewellery collection features the city’s patron saint, the Lion of St Mark, in a beautiful set of rings, earrings and necklaces. This ring features a blue 30.92-carat sapphire flanked by two diamond lion heads.

Gucci: Hortus Deliciarum

There’s a whole universe captured in Gucci's second high-jewellery collection, Hortus Deliciarum, from exotic horticulture and majestic beasts to striking constellations. The Gucci nightfall necklace, inspired by a starry night sky, features an explosion of 57 fancy diamonds and 357 diamonds.

Shahla Karimi: Zodiac Reveal Rings

In Shahla Karimi’s Zodiac Reveal rings, diamonds representing stars are spread throughout the band, so ascertaining the constellation and wearer’s zodiac sign is like discovering a little secret. With a thick band of 14k ethical gold, the rings look best worn on the pinky finger.

The post Hong Kong Legend Wing Shya on Photography and Asian Cinema appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

We chart the global ascent of Asian cinema, from blockbusters to independent arthouse.

At this exact moment in time, the world is in the thrall of Squid Game, the violence-soaked South Korean series that’s set records for Netflix (at 111 million viewers and counting) by becoming the platform’s most popular show ever.

Before that, Chloe Zhao’s history-making first Academy Awards as an Asian woman justifiably seized the spotlight at this year’s ceremony. But there’s also been the remarkable achievement of Hong Kong director Derek Tsang, which somehow missed the degree of attention it surely would have attracted in previous years.

So let’s start with a little reminder.

The Rise of Asian Cinema

This past year, Tsang became the first-ever Hong Kong-born director to have a feature film nominated for an Academy Award when his China-set bullying-and-crime themed drama Better Days was in the running for the Best International Feature Film award.

Better Days is only the second feature film the 41-year-old Tsang has directed on his own, and that its edgy, fringe-of-mainstream subject matter – and style – won over the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was a surprise, not least to the man himself, who admits, “We never really thought it was going to be that well-received, critically or commercially. We just thought we’d put a whole lot of heart into making this film – and hopefully, that would make the audience appreciate the effort and the story.”

But the world has woken up to what’s going on in Asia, and the nod to Tsang’s work was a further reflection of the growing influence and grip the region’s cinema – and its content creators – have on the global audience, both mainstream and art house. That notion was confirmed on the same Oscars night in April, when the China-born Zhao became the first Asian woman to win Best Director and Best Picture with Nomadland, her atmospheric and mesmerising portrait of age – and of an ageing America.

There’s increased interest, too, in the way Asian filmmakers tell their stories, and a welcome change in perception, given the traditional dominance of a viewpoint very much that of filmmakers who are predominately white, middle class and male.

Never one to miss the tide of public opinion, Hollywood has rapidly added depth to its talent pool, turning to Zhao to take the reins of the Marvel Cinematic Universe superhero actioner Eternals, set for release this month and the first time an Asian woman has added her vision to the franchise. Meanwhile, the first Asian-led superhero flick, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings has so far taken more than US$400 million from the global box office – with over $214 million of that in the US, making it 2021’s biggest blockbuster in America.

At this year’s Oscars, Korean-American Lee Isaac Chung’s family drama Minari was also in the running for Best Picture and Best Director (as well as Best Actor for Steven Yeun), and picked up the Best Supporting Actress award for the veteran Youn Yuh-jung, proving the change many hoped might follow Bong Joon-ho’s all-conquering Parasite last year has indeed been seismic.

The South Korean director had long called for the world at large to “overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” and his stylishly dark and dystopian suburban thriller showed how easy that can be, as Bong walked away with four Oscars of his own in 2020, including those for Best Picture and Best Director.

So, yes, ignore the haters. It often really does take Oscars acknowledgement to wake up the cinema-going public, and the film industry itself. Just look where Tsang is now, at the time of writing. He didn’t win the Oscar – it went to the Danish black comedy Another Round – but he’s since been plucked from the relative obscurity of pre-Oscar life and set to work in London by the global streaming giant Netflix.

Tsang is currently directing two episodes of Netflix’s much-anticipated adaptation of Chinese author Liu Cixin’s acclaimed sci-fi epic Three-Body Problem, and he’s working under the gaze of the creative team that gave the world the Game of Thrones phenomenon.

“For sure, opportunity-wise there’s been a huge change [after the nomination],” Tsang says via Zoom, after a day on-set in London. “A lot of producers from different countries are reaching out to us and there’s a lot of talk about collaboration. “The past couple of years it’s really felt like there’s a demand for more Asian content, be it feature films or streaming content, with the success of Chloe Zhao and Crazy Rich Asians at the box office, and now Squid Game. It’s just like, all of a sudden, the momentum is really there.”

The Asian successes have continued on the international festival circuit in 2021, with Japan’s Ryusuke Hamaguchi taking away three prizes at Cannes, including Best Screenplay, for Drive My Car, following the Silver Bear he lifted from Berlin for Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.

“Sometimes good stories have to come from a different country,” says Tsang, “and reading subtitles isn’t as big an obstacle as a lot of producers or studios once thought. So now everybody’s hungry for international content, not just Asian content, but for a good story that can travel well across different cultures and to different nations. It’s a really exciting time for Asian storytellers.”

In the art-house world, the festival circuit this year has so far been owned by the 42-year-old Hamaguchi, and a way of filmmaking that’s literary in texture, with long, slow takes of people engaged with each other, and no fear at all about his audience’s attention span. His love-soaked Happy Hour (2015) actually runs for five of them, while Drive My Car stretches for three.

Taken from a Haruki Murakami short story that traces the relationship between a widowed actor and the young woman he takes on as a driver, the latter has already been thrust forward as Japan’s hopeful for the next round of Oscars. It follows Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, which weaves its way around three coincidences and how they affect the love lives of his characters. These are films in which emotions and truth come as a slow reveal – as does the drama – and they’re steeped in a poetic style of cinema championed by Asian masters of yesteryear, such as Japan’s Yasujiro Ozu (Tokyo Story).

“In life, your heart is always trembling,” says Hamaguchi, when we talk via Zoom during this year’s Far East Film Festival in Italy. “It’s not stable. It’s very important that these characters are trembling like this, otherwise, they’d be boring characters. It’s by having these characters tremble like this that I can portray universal feelings. In a way, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy can be seen as a kind of an experiment with the way I’m telling the stories and I want to keep doing this – experimenting with storytelling.”

At last month’s Busan International Film Festival – the largest and most influential in Asia – both Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car played as part of the Gala Presentation programme and Hamaguchi was joined on stage by Bong Joon-ho for a discussion of each other’s lives and times.

Ever the showman when an audience gathers, the Korean director admits to a personal obsession with Hamaguchi’s style of storytelling. “His movies help us experience the progress to the core of our inner emotions and feelings,” Bong says. “Thanks to his sophisticated and intricate portrayal, a three-hour film isn’t an obstacle.”

Another champion of slow-burn, atmospheric and emotive cinema, Hong Kong auteur Wong Kar-wai is currently tucked away in Shanghai putting the finishing touches to his own plunge into pure mainstream, the suitably romantic-looking TV series Blossoms, set for streaming via Tencent Video. The Covid-19 lockdowns seem to have fast-tracked acceptance of and access to Asian content, globally.

“Streaming is a completely different platform from feature films, where you’re constrained by two hours, max,” says Tsang. “You can go for a couple of seasons to really develop your stories and your characters. As a filmmaker and as a storyteller, it’s just really exciting to have the option of choosing which storytelling platform or device is more suitable for your story.”

But that’s not to say that the big screen remains the dream. Thailand’s art-house darling and Cannes Palme d’Or-winner Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives) is another Asian filmmaker who’s crossed over into the mainstream this year – or as close to it as an artist who regularly features in his films characters from the spirit worlds might possibly ever get.

This year he released his first English-language feature – the mystery Memoria, starring Tilda Swinton – as the world wakes up to his unique talent and an almost mystical style of filmmaking.

“Nationality seems to be less relevant compared to 10-20 years ago,” he says. “The streaming platforms are good opportunities, as they target local content and audiences. I think the streaming platforms have created a different kind of moving image and formula. Yet they also make us aware that the cinema experience, the communal experience, is unique and precious.”

(Hero image courtesy of Netflix)

The post Eyes East: The Rise of Asian Cinema appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.

The 91-second short includes behind-the-scenes footage and is accompanied by thirty mementos from Wong’s filmography.

The post Celebrated auteur Wong Kar-Wai is turning unseen “In the Mood For Love” footage into an NFT appeared first on The Peak Magazine.

The 91-second short includes behind-the-scenes footage and is accompanied by thirty mementos from Wong’s filmography.

For more stories like this, visit www.thepeakmagazine.com.sg.

Twenty years after working on Wong Kar-wai’s seminal movie In the Mood for Love, photographer Wing Shya talks to us about capturing the essence of that film, and his own career as a director.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of Wong Kar-wai’s In theMood for Love, arguably the Hong Kong film -- and certainly the one that exported a romantic, nostalgia-tinged vision of our city to a global audience.

This year’s Cannes film festival, though cancelled due to Covid19, was expected to celebrate the movie, on which a relatively inexperienced photographer, Wing Shya, captured still photographs of protagonist lovers Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung under moody lights and dramatic shadows.

[caption id="attachment_208567" align="alignnone" width="1388"] Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung in In the Mood for Love[/caption]

“We worked day and night on that film," says Shya. “At that time we just worked like that. It was a small team and not a big budget ... And we really didn’t know the film would become so huge and famous."

Twenty years on and the man who subsequently became Hong Kong’s most famous photographer is fast becoming an established film director in his own right, with some of his movies - like the ones he’s been shooting lately - being produced by Wong Kar-wai’s film company, Jettone. The tight-knit duo have been working together on-and-off in some capacity for 25 years.

“When I started taking photos for Wong Kar-wai on his films,"Shya says, “the first film job was for Happy Together with Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung, in Argentina. I didn’t really know anything about photography ... and it was kind of the same with being a film director. I learned so much on the job just on my first movie, Hot Summer Days, with Tony Chan.

“It’s so different from doing photography - when you’re a photographer you can be very emotional. You take the picture and it can be very focused. As a film director you always have to think about all these different elements - the visual, the actors, the dialogue, the mood - constantly thinking every second of shooting. It’s hard work and so difficult."

[caption id="attachment_208569" align="alignnone" width="1384"] Leslie Cheung[/caption]

Acclaimed writer and film director Tony Chan teamed up with Shya for Hot Summer Days, after asking him to help direct a script that he’d been working on. Shya says it involved almost a year of sitting down with each other in Starbucks to work on the film. Remarkably, especially for directing newbie Shya, it became the first Hong Kong

Chinese film made by the giant 20th Century Fox “We went for a five-minute presentation with the guy from Fox, as he was about to go to the airport. It was so rushed but he loved it, and three months later they decided to fund the film. It was really crazy, they met a lot of other directors in Hong Kong and China but decided to choose us."

Now Shya is in the midst of directing his third and fourth feature films (in addition to a few shorts) - shooting in Shanghai was temporarily stalled because of the virus, but will resume shortly. All his films have been quirky romantic comedies set in Hong Kong or mainland Chinese cities.

[caption id="attachment_208566" align="alignnone" width="1398"] Angelababy and Jing Boran in Hot Summer Days[/caption]

Along with Hot Summer Days (2010), his second film Love in Space (2011) really established Shya’s nostalgic, witty and light-hearted style and genre. When I ask why he chose comedy, he says it’s something that he always wanted to do. “I love comedy," he says. “I want to go to a movie theatre and laugh out loud."

In terms of stars and celebrity, Shya has worked with almost all of them, capturing images of the late golden era of Hong Kong stars, such as Leslie Cheung, Shu Q, Faye Wong, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung as they acted or waited on set. Shya was a deft hand at shooting these stars off-guard, a style so different from the glossy, cultivated looks of Hong Kong celebrities that the media had previously been used to.

In the last 10 years as a filmmaker, he’s directed the likes of Aaron Kwok, Eason Chan, Nicholas Tse, Angelababy, Barbie Hsu, Daniel Wu and Rene Liu, and continues to work with some of China’s biggest rising screen stars.

When I ask if he has any favourites, since there are a few names that regularly come up, Shya diplomatically replies, “Sometimes I don’t choose the stars, actors and actresses ... Jettone is producing my films now and sometimes they’re chosen by the producers. Sometimes there are so many investors to take care of, and they also have a say in casting the stars," he says with a laugh.

It’s Shya’s laidback attitude, wit and sense of humour that have made him such a unicorn in the world of photography, fashion and film. There are no airs nor graces, despite his having achieved cult fame in Hong Kong and China. He’s exhibited in London’s V&A and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and has shot for the likes of iD Magazine,Vogue Italia and Numero. Today, Shya remains one of the most down-to-earth talents I’ve met in this city. Even when talking about his remarkable reputation and success, his take is very typically Shya. “Everything that happened in my life and career has been partly luck ... All the moves and new directions have been natural and organic ... I didn’t really plan it, I just kind of go with the flow and how I feel."

As for that instantly recognisable signature mood, aesthetic and style, Shya says that meeting Terry Jones of iD and shooting for the magazine early on was a defining moment in his career. “Terry was kind of my mentor in establishing my style. When I met him, he just gave me the freedom to do whatever I wanted; that creative freedom was amazing and not something that I could find easily in Hong Kong. I could shoot naked people, or blurry pictures - it was the freedom that gave me the inspiration to create my style."

[caption id="attachment_208570" align="alignnone" width="1383"] Shu Qi opposite Du Juan[/caption]

In late 2017, the Shanghai Centre of Photography held a retrospective exhibition of Shya’s work, titled Acting Out - a collection of personal work as well as broad selection of images from his time as Wong Kar-wai’s on-set stills photographer - curated by noted Chinese art critic and curator Karen Smith from his entire image archive (outtakes and mistakes included). The opening, attended by Shya’s family, was an emotional event for him.

Today, the once-prolific fashion photography has mostly stopped. He still shoots for a select few clients and magazines, but is kept increasingly busy by film protects. But that doesn’t mean Shya doesn’t still keep an eye on the photography and fashion scenes, and the many young photographic talents coming out of Hong Kong, China and Asia.

“My style is already vintage style, a bit nostalgic, and honestly I’m not really up to date any more, but I love what the young photographers are doing -- it’s so exciting. It’s not the same stuff that I can do -- but I love it."

The post Photographer Wing Shya on Light and Shadow appeared first on Prestige Online - Hong Kong.