Author Iris Chen

The characters in a Roy Andersson advertisement wear whiteface: a memento mori. It’s one of the reasons why one watches these otherwise ordinary scenes with a bit of apprehension; they are ordinary in the way t...

In China, over half of all internet-users watch vertical dramas: that is an audience of over 576 million people. Sun Hong’s Yānhuǒ Rénjiān (This Is Life, 2020) is the first and, to my knowledge, only vertical d...

Photographs and films cannot show you that the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake was “the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japan” nor say outright that the tsunami that followed killed nearly 20,000 people. Capti...