Taylor to Perfection: Beyond the guitar strum, blonde locks and sold-out concerts, there is plenty of substance to Taylor Swift’s striking silhouette

It was music for Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift for music at the get-go. The country star turned pop star royalty showed a passion for music at a young age and quickly advanced from parts in children’s theatre to performing in front of a large audience. Before a Philadelphia 76ers basketball game at age 11, she sang The Star-Spangled Banner and the following year she picked up the guitar and started writing songs.

Swift created original music that expressed her experiences of tween alienation by drawing inspiration from country-music performers like Shania Twain and the Dixie Chicks. Her parents, supportive of her ambition for a musical career, sold their farm in Pennsylvania when she was 13 and relocated to Hendersonville, Tennessee, so she could attract the attention of country labels in nearby Nashville.

Swift met recording-industry veterans through a development arrangement with RCA Records, and in 2004, when she was 14 years old, she signed with Sony/ ATV as a songwriter. She frequently played her own songs at venues in the Nashville region, and it was during one of these performances that record executive Scott Borchetta took note.

Swift was recruited by Borchetta to his budding Big Machine label, and in the summer of 2006, she released her debut single, Tim McGraw, which was heavily influenced by the teenager’s favourite country musician. And the rest, including her chart-topping discographies, as they say, is history (her story in that case).

Voice for feminism

When the Grammy Award-winning music video – full of strong women kicking ass – for her iconic hit Bad Blood came back to back with her topping Maxim’s 2015 Hot 100 list, she took a moment to speak out about feminism and equality: “A man writing about his feelings from a vulnerable place is brave; a woman writing about her feelings from a vulnerable place is oversharing or whining. Misogyny is ingrained in people from the time they are born. So, to me, feminism is probably the most important movement that you could embrace, because it’s just basically another word for equality.”

At the same time, Swift faced criticism for penning too many songs in the past about her ex-boyfriends and other intimate relationships. She finds this critique anti-feminist and no longer has time for it. “When I was a teenager, I would hear people talk about sexism in the music industry, and I’d be like, I don’t see it. I don’t understand. Then I realised that was because I was a kid,” she explains.

“I didn’t see myself being held back until I was a woman. Or the double standards in headlines, the double standards in the way stories are told, the double standards in the way things are perceived.” She used her 2019 song The Man to emphasise how women and men are treated differently in the industry.

Political pride

Taylor also wants people to know that she supports the LGBTQ community, having received criticism of inaction in this regard. She claims she has consistently supported the movement through her work and charitable contributions. Clarifying her viewpoint, she says: “I didn’t realise until recently that I could advocate for a community that I’m not a part of. It’s hard to know how to do that without being so fearful of making a mistake that you just freeze.”

You Need To Calm Down, the smash-hit single from her 2019 album Lover, highlights her support of the LGBTQ community. The music video features Katy Perry, Ellen DeGeneres and iconic drag queens. The whole Lover catalogue was released at midnight on June 1, the beginning of Pride Month, when Swift introduced a petition in support of the US federal Equality Act. This legislation would amend the Civil Rights Act to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

Swift also posted a letter to the Republican Lamar Alexander, then the US Senator from Tennessee, asking him to vote yes. The request, on her personal letterhead, denounced President Donald Trump for not supporting the Equality Act. “I personally reject the president’s stance,” Swift wrote. Need she say more?

Unfashionable authenticity

Since breaking into the public eye in 2006 as a 16-year-old wunderkind, Swift has become one of the most commercially successful singers of all time. Last year, her songs received 36.6 billion streams, but her aesthetic has never attracted the same kind of attention. Unlike her contemporaries, she isn’t necessarily a fashion icon. She rarely attends Fashion Week and frequently misses the Met Gala. She favours light-blue wash denim shorts, a faded pink vest and unassuming sneakers.

Despite being quite nondescript, this style is notable for how Taylor Swift really is. Her attire suggests that she may be performing at a local talent show even though she is playing to tens of thousands of fans on a stadium tour. Lots of slogan T-shirts, sparkly bodysuits and prom dresses with meringue skirts. Her current tour, dubbed Eras, is a retrospective of the outfits from each of her 10 studio albums.

However, a lack of fashion cred is not always a terrible thing. She is a sincere and cinematic hitmaker who effortlessly navigates embarrassing confessionals on Lover and small- town stagnation on Midnight (2022). All of this is done with an unfashionable authenticity.

Swift is portrayed in pop culture as the wise best friend that her followers wish they had when they were teenagers (the Swifties actually exchange friendship bracelets). She is someone who may have covered their eyelids in glitter after being rejected by their preferred prom date, a person who would take great satisfaction in creating the ideal ‘heartbreak’ sundae with heaped piles of whipped cream, Oreos and chocolate syrup.

Swift’s songwriting, in contrast to that of so many of her peers, is more likely to make references to her pet cats and a home-for- the-holidays crush than a Hermès bag. And this ordinariness resonates with many more people than perhaps she ever imagined when she first visited Nashville as a child and dreamed of making it big.

Strokes Of Genius: 50 years after his passing, the art world muses on Picasso’s magic and missteps

The man, the myth, the misogynist – just three of the few words that best describe Pablo Picasso, one of the world’s most celebrated artists of modern times. The many sides of his life and work come under the spotlight this year as institutions around the globe mark the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death.

Given that he was originally thought to have stolen the Mona Lisa, it’s safe to assume that the co-founder of Cubism endured early troughs among the peaks of his path to fame. Improbable though it may sound, Picasso was a prime suspect when Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece vanished from the Louvre in 1911. The picture was later found to have been stolen by a former museum employee, but not before Picasso was cast in a doubtful light. It was a low point in what would become a dazzling, high-profile career.

Ever prolific, Picasso created tens of thousands of works of art, experimented with a bewildering variety of styles, and never stopped innovating. His legacy is still exciting and inspiring to artists and art enthusiasts everywhere, and tributes abound half a century after his passing.

The governments of Spain and France, where he spent most of his adult life, have partnered for Célébration Picasso 1973-2023, which embraces some 50 exhibitions and events in Europe and North America. Hong Kong joined in the remembrance by showing a glistening selection of his masterpieces in an intriguing medium.

Sotheby’s, which has championed some of the happenings in this timely retrospective of his work and life, highlights Picasso’s formidable influence as the resident artist of the 20th century – an idiosyncratic eye refracting the turbulence, traumas, dreams and visions of his times into stunning visual statements that challenged convention and still pulsate with energy today.

Naturally, the Musée National Picasso-Paris is central to the year-long salute; it has already held one tribute show masterminded by British designer Paul Smith, while another from French conceptual artist Sophie Calle begins in October. It also opens a Centre for Picasso Studies in the prestigious and newly renovated quarters of Hôtel de Rohan, a short walk from the museum’s equally storied building in the Marais district. This unique resource for the artist and his subjects combines documentation, a library and archives around a research centre and a digital gateway.

Period pieces

When Picasso passed away in 1973, at the age of 91, it was discovered that he kept pieces from all his periods in his 78-year oeuvre. It took seven years to complete an inventory of his works in all media, and many held by his family landed in the hands of the French authorities as payment for inheritance taxes. It was this initial body of work that enabled the Musée National Picasso-Paris to open its doors nearly 40 years ago.

Olivier Widmaier Picasso, the artist’s grandson, gathered exclusive testimonies, historical records and personal photos from this time to make a new documentary entitled Picasso, The Legacy. Sponsored by Sotheby’s, it is an intimate exposure of the man and the splendour of his artistry.

Bohemian romance

Another way to glean more about the artist’s life is through ‘Picasso’s Montmartre with Le Meurice, Celebrating 50 Years’, an experience that combines an overnight stay at the grand hotel in Paris with a guided walking tour that propels art enthusiasts back in time to the hedonistic, bohemian era of the Belle Époque. When Pablo Picasso married Russian ballerina and early muse Olga Khokhlova in 1918, the wedding reception was held at the hotel and it was the season’s biggest affair.

Le Meurice’s expert guide succeeds in opening minds to the romance and derring-do of the youthful non-conformist in the early 1900s. When he first arrived in Paris, Picasso was regarded with suspicion as a foreigner and watched by the French police for his supposed anarchist leanings. During the walk, anecdotes are shared and landmarks are highlighted while tracing his ootsteps through the cobblestone alleyways of Montmartre where he once lived and painted.

Changing with the ages

More than five decades later, in 1961, Picasso married Jacqueline Roque, the face that launched more than 400 portraits completed in the dozen years before his death. Museum Casa Natal Picasso in Málaga, Spain – the artist’s hometown – stages The Ages of Pablo, a chronological and stylistic overview of works from his formative years to the time spent with his second wife.

Picasso is revealed through his paintings, sketches, sculptures, ceramics and photographs, all of which have enduring value. Demonstrating his dynamic ability to convey life and emotion, the exhibition is divided into eight sections corresponding to the major phases of his art, including ‘Blue and Pink’, ‘Cubism’, ‘Classicism’, ‘Surrealism’, ‘Wartime’ and ‘The Joy of Living’.

Glass act

Here at home, Hong Kongers were able to join the momentous commemoration as a summer exhibition, Pablo Picasso: Paintings in Glass, threw light on some of his most-known painterly compositions. A collaboration between the University Museum and Art Gallery of the University of Hong Kong and the French May Arts Festival, it paid tribute not only to the iconic artist but also to the art form of gemmail.

A type of stained-glass mosaic developed by French painter Jean Crotti and perfected in the workshop of Roger Malherbe-Navarre, gemmail involves the expert assembly and melting of meticulously chosen pieces of glass. When Picasso first witnessed the gemmistes’ endeavour in 1954, he exclaimed, “A new art is born!” Enthused, he proceeded to layer shards of glass into graphical representations of more than 50 of his existing paintings.

The 50th anniversary of Picasso’s passing is, above all, a tremendous opportunity to honour his creative legacy while also challenging key events in his life, particularly his relationships with women who became his muses and lovers. “People were happy to be consumed by him,” his daughter Paloma Picasso, the jewellery designer, has said. “They thought it was a privilege. If you get too close to the Sun, it burns you. But the Sun can’t help being the Sun.” As evidenced by many of his life documentations, Picasso cared primarily for his creations, but what creations they were!

Photos: University Museum and Art Gallery, The University of Hong Kong

Adventure Weekend: A guide to exciting staycations for the family

Most people in Hong Kong have been hunkering down and staying home since January this year —for obvious reasons. With overseas travelling out of the picture, staycations have been trending.  Although, relishing in the comforts of a five-star hotel is often enticing, it may not appeal to families with active lifestyles and adventurous spirits. But worry not —Hong Kong has plenty of green lands and open seas to revel in that could equate to a holiday in Thailand or the Philippines. Here are some ideas for planning an exciting staycation for the adventurous family:

exciting family staycation in hong kong sai yuen monkey climbing abseiling teepee tent geodesic domes camping day and oivernight gafencu
Image from saiyuen.com

Saiyuen Camping & Adventure Park
With four different camping grounds that offer the accommodations in the form of safari tents and teepees. The children will have their fun in the outdoors tree-climbing and abseiling provided with the campsite facilities. You can also take up the chance to star-gaze within their geodesic domes. 

exciting family staycation in hong kong jkclub caravan camping day and overnight gafencu
Image from jkclub.com.hk

JK Club
Parked in its own private drive, this campsite offers a well-equipped caravan experience for the family that misses bunking in a mobile home on long roads. Although you won’t be able to drive in these caravans, you will however have plenty of hiking trails and waterfalls to visit around Lantau Island and a BBQ feast to enjoy afterwards. 

exciting family staycation in hong kong Asiamarine yacht day and overnight gafencu
Image from asiamarine.com/hkg 

Asiamarine
If you prefer a more luxurious stay but still want to breathe in the open air, enjoy the sun on deck, wakeboard against the waves, and spend the night at sea on a yacht. Asiamarine provides an array of sails of different sizes for both half-day charters or overnight trips. Equipped with Bose sound systems, a BBQ grill, and accommodations that vary between two to four cabins, you can enjoy the luxury of quality and space away from the city.

exciting family staycation in hong kong hellohongkong yacht day and overnight gafencu

2-Day Eco Adventure Sail
Another option for taking the kids out to sea is through hellohongkong.com, where they offer a two-day Eco Adventure trip around Hong Kong’s protected Geoparks and a visit to the pristine sandy white beaches of Tai Long Wan. Inclusive with an overnight accommodation in their 56-feet fully-equipped cruising sloop with two double cabins that can sleep four to six people comfortably.

Whether under a tent or out at sea, these staycations will be an experience for the family to remember and an exciting story for the kids to tell. However, in these challenging times, although we try to provide the most accurate and up-to-date information, we do advice our readers to enquire with the above establishments directly for updated news. 

 

 

Monkey seeings, monkey doings in Hong Kong’s year gone by

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Congratulations world, we’ve reached 2017. There were, to be fair, a number of times of late when it didn’t seem like we’d make it. If 1848 was The Year of Revolution and 1963 was The Year Sex was Invented, how will future generations look back on 2016? The year when voters around the world finally proved that democracy doesn’t work? The year when all the talented musicians died?

To be fair, Hong Kong has had its own share of political drama. At one time or another, it felt like hardly anybody was happy about The Way Things Were or, indeed, about The Way Things Were Likely To Be in The Future. Thinking back, though, pretty much the same sentiments dominated both 2015 and 2014. It could be, then, that 2017 will be The Year That Was Pretty Much Like The Previous Three Only More So. We shall just have to see, won’t we?

The chances are, however, that the number of celebrity deaths, at least, will decline in 2017 – largely on the grounds that there aren’t that many left. Beginning with David Bowie’s departure back in January, a steady parade of celebrities shuffled off their respective mortal coils, providing a somewhat sombre backdrop to the year. Even Hong Kong was not immune with the jewellery tycoon – and founder of the Chow Tai Fook Group – Cheng Yu-tung passing away and proving to be the city’s highest profile casualty.

For the SAR, overall though, the year began with a bang. And a crash. The bangs came courtesy of the traditional firework display over Victoria Harbour, while the crash was the one that shook the city’s stock market, which fell by three and a half percent on the first day of trading. Thus the tone for 2016 was set, with the cause apparently a larger drop – seven percent – in the Shanghai stock exchange. This would not be the only occasion when Hong Kong was shaken by mainland developments.

David Bowie memorial

There were more bangs and crashes on the first day of the Chinese New Year, when a disagreement over fish balls turned nasty in Mong Kok. If any place in the world were to be the setting for a street food contretemps, it would most likely be Hong Kong.

The incident – triggered over a disagreement relating to the legal status of hawkers – resulted in the worst street violence seen in Hong Kong since the 1960s, at least according to The Economist.

Some 50 arrests and a near hundred injuries later, things quietened down, but the underlying anger seemed to simmer throughout the rest of the year.

Indeed, an HKU poll published in March found that confidence in the future of the city was at its lowest since April 2003. A further poll, carried out later in the year by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, found that 40 percent of all Hong Kong residents wanted to leave the city, a number that rose to 57 percent in the case of 18-to-30-year-olds. As a result, it wasn’t surprising that politics was on the agenda, though for Hong Kong book publishers hoping for freedom of travel across the mainland, it was probably best left off the agenda all together.

Hawkers fighting in February

Prudent caution about senior mainlanders aside, discussion of Hong Kong’s own first family was, by comparison, all but compulsory. In April there was the airport incident involving Leung Chung-yan, which saw the chief exec’s daughter allegedly get Daddy to order airport staff to fetch her carry-on luggage from the wrong side of security.

Later in the same month, Regina Leung, the chief exec’s wife, also raised eyebrows when she seemingly instructed Hong Kongers to start growing their own vegetables. The understandable response from many angry residents was that their Mong Kok tower block was not overly blessed with surplus vegetable plots. Funny that.

While CY Leung’s family proved to be the city’s favourite soap opera, the way in which Hong Kong residents followed more traditional fare also changed in 2016, most notably on April 1 when ATV went off the air. With its glory days long gone, few mourned the channel’s ultimate demise.

After a short but respectful gap, a new channel – ViuTV – took to the airwaves, winning viewers over with its hearty selection of Korean dramas, a sign perhaps of the changing of the cultural guard across Asia. Despite that, all has not gone entirely well for the new station, which found itself embroiled in the murky topic of independence. Murkier still, one late night talk show attracted several complaints after guests ate food from one another’s armpits.

Housing was another theme running throughout 2016, pretty much as it has been in Hong Kong since time immemorial. More grist to the mill came in June, though, when Chen Hongtian, a Shenzhen tycoon, bought a house on the Peak for a record HK$2.1 billion. This saw a whinge of journalists try to uncover any interesting details at all about the previously little known businessman. Indeed, he became such a topic of discussion that, when his company bought an unexceptional office block in Kowloon for an unexceptional price, the SCMP headlined the tale as: “The buyer of Hong Kong’s most expensive home strikes again.”

Cathay plane_path

Records were also broken last year in the meteorological arena, with the mean temperatures in July and October proving to be the highest since records began back in 1884. June set a different kind of record when it proved to be the month with the most consecutive days of temperatures in excess of 35 degrees ever. Clearly not wanting to be left out, the period September to November weighed in with 1,078.8mm of rain, taking the record for the highest amount of rainfall ever recorded in autumn. While it didn’t all fall during the Clockenflap outdoor music festival, for many participants, it might as well have.

Other events to fall foul of the weather included Hong Kong’s inaugural marquee cricketing tournament – the 2020 Blitz. Although it triumphed in bringing Michael Clarke, the former Australian captain, to the territory back in May, the fact that he spent much of his visit in the changing room was a disappointment to many.

Staying in the sporting arena, 38 athletes travelled from Hong Kong to Rio for the Olympics. Commenting on their success, Hong Kong’s chef de mission, Kenneth Fok, urged Hong Kongers to avoid regarding Olympic medals as the be-all and end-all of sporting achievement. A cynic might suggest that he would have said something different had Hong Kong not finished joint bottom of the table, with a grand total of zero medals.

So, with sport clearly not providing a great deal of positivity, Hong Kongers found themselves obliged to look further afield. Unfortunately, travel proved a particularly expensive affair in the latter part of the year when Cathay Pacific got its sums horribly wrong. Due to the company’s finance department betting the wrong way on oil prices, from mid-September onwards all passengers on Cathay Pacific and Dragon Air had to pay an additional HK$109 fuel surcharge.

If that didn’t deter people from visiting Asia’s world city, then the international coverage of the Rurik Jutting murder trial probably dissuaded any waverers from making the trip. Back in November, the sensational headlines relating to the case gave the distinct impression that Wan Chai was home to legions of coked-up bankers and Filipino good time girls who charged by the hour. Sometimes it’s hard to recognise our beloved city from the overseas press it gets.

While the number of scandals Hong Kong is home to are surely proof of some kind of vibrancy within the SAR’s boundaries, they are probably not laying quite the right groundwork for a city that is clearly at some kind of crossroads.

Indeed, many of the events of 2016 seem little more than distractions, incidental details that divert attention from the fact this particular East/West melting pot is still casting around for its future role on the world stage. Will 2017 see a clearer path emerging? Will Rurik Jutting be heading home for Christmas next year? The answer to both questions may well be an equally resounding no – but only time will tell the outcome.