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Netflix menu screen for Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, a spiral-etched head beside the Play button

Through the looking glass of doom

‘Black Mirror: Bandersnatch’ has five main endings and a trillion permutations. Charlie Brooker: ‘It’s all a bit like a bloody Rubik’s Cube.’

By Igan D'Bayan · December 29, 2018
Richard Paterson raises a nosing glass of whisky in a navy blazer and striped tie

If a Jackson Pollock painting were a drink, it would be single malt Scotch

Richard Paterson, the nose behind The Dalmore, holds court in Uptown Bonifacio on casks, memory, and why a great single malt behaves like a Pollock.

By Igan D'Bayan · September 1, 2018
Tarot-style portrait cards of the interviewed culture-makers, each one named and montaged with their own work, spread across a dark table beside a face-down card printed with an all-seeing eye

Agents of Culture

Cecile Licad, Mark Justiniani and more Filipino culture-makers on the simplest hard questions: what makes you happy, and what is your hope for the country?

By Igan D'Bayan · July 29, 2018
Deepa Chatrath and Emerson Yao stand beside a gilded Patek Philippe display at the launch

A concise history of tomorrow: Patek Philippe launches its ‘Knowledge Series’

Deepa Chatrath tells people the best minds work in mechanical watchmaking: the astronomers, the mathematicians, the master craftsmen.

By Igan D'Bayan · July 21, 2018
White outline reliefs of clinic scenes across two grey walls: a doctor with a patient, an eye chart, a figure in a wheelchair and a child on crutches

Inside the cube where art and healthcare meet

Cardiologist and collector Dr. William Chua once got Malang and Ang Kiukok into one room. Inside the clinic where medicine and Philippine art share a wall.

By Igan D'Bayan · June 19, 2018
Emerson Yao raises a fist and holds up a marathon finisher medal, in a blue running jacket and sunglasses against a bright criss-crossed backdrop

What races through Emerson Yao’s mind while running

Lucerne’s Emerson Yao on the ideas that arrive mid-marathon, from Roxas Boulevard to the Champs-Élysées, and why motion is when the mind goes quiet.

By Igan D'Bayan · May 1, 2018
Hands hold a tablet showing a dark circular interface ringed with images and menu icons for saved, moments and recent

‘Black Mirror,’ mirror on the wall

Charlie Brooker returns with the year’s scariest monster already in your pocket: selfies, the Cloud, and technology gone clumsily, inadvertently evil.

By Igan D'Bayan · January 1, 2018
Visitors in the courtyard of Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine in Fukuoka, its curved traditional roof framed by trees

Set the controls for the heart of Kyushu

Tokyo and Osaka hog the feed; Kyushu is the deep cut. Fukuoka to Nagasaki to Beppu, via hot-spring “hells” and a Dutch park with a Horror Toilet.

By Igan D'Bayan · August 12, 2017
Spanish artist Ginés Serrán works on the face of his full scale clay model of General Martín Delgado on horseback, later cast in bronze for Iloilo, in a studio with tall windows

The sad, extraordinary tale of a general in the Revolución exiled as a ‘leper,’ as told by a Spanish artist

Spanish artist Ginés Serrán on sculpting a bronze monument in Iloilo for General Martín Delgado, the revolutionary hero exiled to Culion.

By Igan D'Bayan · October 24, 2016
Parody of Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam album cover, retitled Cthulhu: The Royal Scam, a suited Cthulhu-headed sleeper on a ledge beneath skyscrapers topped with snarling beasts

Even further adventures in hi-fi: Or ‘You zombie be born again, my friend’

Speakers heavy as a monolith, vinyl drops at six in the morning, and a Hong Kong audio show where Jeff Buckley never really died

By Igan D'Bayan · October 9, 2016
Snow-capped Himalayan peaks floating above haze behind a forested hillside village in morning light

The day I got high at the Himalayas

A Himalayan sunrise from a windy hotel terrace in Nagarkot, thangka brushes of a single hair, and an open-air cremation on the Bagmati.

By Igan D'Bayan · February 15, 2015
Bob Feleo in a white shirt looking up at his life-size bark-textured figure with a flame for a head, arms raised over a wide circle of small clay balls on the gallery floor

A shot of Basi with Bob Feleo

‘I don’t believe in inspiration,’ says master sculptor Bob Feleo, on the Basi Revolt of 1807 and why art should provoke thought.

By Igan D'Bayan · January 26, 2015