Zubin Rada Krishnan succeeds Salim Dhanani as acting group CEO
BigPay currently has 1.3mil users representing nearly 50% growth YoY
BigPay, a Capital A venture company and fintech in Southeast Asia has announced the appointment of Zubin Rada Krishnan (pic) as acting Group CEO.
Zubin was the Malaysia country head for BigPay the past year and…Continue Reading
Getty ImagesA new symbol has appeared in the kaleidoscopic jumble of neon signs that light up Sukhumvit Road, Bangkok’s most international street. The sudden ubiquity of the five-pointed marijuana leaf, in lurid green, announces the spectacular boom there has been in weed-related businesses in Thailand since cannabis was decriminalised last June.
Walk two kilometres east of the BBC office in Bangkok, and you pass more than 40 dispensaries, selling potent marijuana flower buds and all the paraphernalia needed to smoke them.
Travel in the opposite direction, to the famous backpacker hangout of Khao San Road, and there is an entire marijuana-themed shopping mall, Plantopia, its shops half-hidden behind the haze of smoke created by customers trying out the product. The website Weed in Thailand lists more than 4,000 businesses across the country selling cannabis and its derivatives.
And this is Thailand, where until last June you could be jailed for five years just for possessing marijuana, up to 15 years for producing it; where other drug offences get the death penalty. The pace of change has been breathtaking.
“It is messy, but then this is Thailand, and without this sudden liberalisation I don’t think it would have happened at all,” says Kitty Chopaka, founder of Elevated Estate, a company that offers advice on the marijuana industry, and has been a part of the parliamentary committee trying to get the new regulations passed.
But this is not the kind of liberalisation long-term campaigners like her dreamed of.
“We need regulation. Spelling out what you can and cannot do,” Ms Chopaka says. “It is causing a lot of confusion, a lot of people not knowing what they can do, what they can put money behind.”
There are some rules in this apparent free-for-all, but they are being enforced haphazardly, if at all. Not all dispensaries have a licence, which they are required to have, and they are supposed to record the provenance of all their cannabis flowers and the personal details of every customer.
No products aside from the unprocessed flower are supposed to have more than 0.2 percent THC, the psychotropic chemical in cannabis, nor can they be sold online. Yet you can find suppliers offering potent weed brownies and gummies with high THC content online, with delivery to your door within an hour. Cannabis cannot be sold to anyone under 20 years old, but who is to know if the product is simply delivered by a motorbike courier?
There are restaurants serving marijuana-laced dishes, you can get marijuana tea, and marijuana ice-cream. Convenience stores are even selling weed-tinged drinking water. The police have admitted that they are so unsure of what is and is not legal they are enforcing very few rules around marijuana.
The new cannabis regime is a bit of a political accident. Anutin Charnvirakul, head of one of Thailand’s larger political parties, made decriminalisation part of his manifesto for the 2019 election. It proved a vote-winner, mostly on the as-yet untested notion that cannabis could be a profitable alternative cash crop for poor farmers. As health minister in the new government, Mr Anutin prioritised getting it taken off the banned narcotics list as soon as possible to fulfil his election pledge.
But Thailand’s parliament, a cauldron of competing interest groups, moves slowly. Cannabis was decriminalised before anyone had been able to write regulations to control the new business. And the planned new laws got bogged down by inter-party bickering. With another general election taking place in May, there is little chance of the law getting through the parliament before the end of the year. Already rival parties are warning of the dangers of unregulated weed, and threatening to re-criminalise it if they take power.
The future of this free-wheeling new industry is uncertain.
Tukta, a 21-year-old university student, jumped on the marijuana bandwagon last year, sinking more than one million baht ($30,000; £23,500) into a dispensary and coffee shop called The Herb Club in Bangkok’s Klong Toei district. She sells 16 different grades of the cured flower, ranging from $10 to $80 a gram, but she worries about possible changes in the law. With so much competition from the many other dispensaries nearby, she says business is neither bad nor good.
“The price is falling because there’s a glut of marijuana,” Ms Chopaka says.
“There are a lot of illegal imports. We are growing strains from overseas, which need air-conditioning and lighting. We should look into developing strains that work for our climate to lower costs.
“We really need to go back to our old heritage, our old cultures. Because cannabis and Thais, Thailand, are very interwoven with each other.”
For many Thais, who have grown up in a country which viewed all narcotics as a dangerous social evil, the dramatic flowering of the weed business since last year is bewildering. Yet the unforgiving official view of drugs is a relatively recent development.
Up until the late 1970s marijuana was widely cultivated by the hill tribes in northern Thailand, in the border area known as the Golden Triangle, which also used to be the source of much of the world’s opium. Marijuana had also been used extensively as a herb and cooking ingredient in north-eastern Thailand.
When US soldiers arrived in the 1960s on “rest and recreation” breaks from fighting in the Vietnam War they discovered Thai stick, locally made from cured marijuana buds wrapped in leaves around a bamboo stick, like a fat cigar. The soldiers began shipping Thai marijuana back home in large quantities; along with Golden Triangle heroin it made up much of the narcotics flow going into the United States.
As the Vietnam War wound down, the US put pressure on Thailand to curb drug production. In 1979 Thailand passed a sweeping Narcotics Act, mandating harsh penalties for using and selling drugs, including the death sentence.
This coincided with a conservative backlash across South East Asia against permissive 1960s attitudes to drugs and sex, a reaction to the ganja-smoking backpackers travelling east along the “hippie trail”. Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia all instructed their immigration officers to look out for hippies and bar them entry. At Singapore airport those with long hair were given a choice of a trip to the barber or being turned around. In Malaysia anyone with sufficiently suspect attributes would have the letters SHIT – suspected hippie in transit – stamped in their passports before being deported.
The Thai government was especially wary of alternative youth culture after it crushed a leftist student movement, killing dozens at Bangkok’s Thammasat University in October 1976. Conservatives feared they might support a communist takeover in Thailand, as had just happened in neighbouring Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam.
Meanwhile a series of royally-sponsored crop substitution projects persuaded most hill tribes to stop cultivating opium and marijuana, and try coffee or macadamia nuts instead.
Since the 1990s cheap methamphetamines have poured into Thailand from war-torn areas of Myanmar. The ruinous social impact of meth addiction turned the Thai public even more firmly against drugs, and led to a brutal anti-drug campaign in 2003, in which at least 1,400 suspected users and dealers were gunned down.
It was the dire overcrowding in Thailand’s prisons – three-quarters of them in for drug offences, many quite minor – that finally persuaded Thai officials to rethink their hardline approach, along with the realisation that marijuana’s medicinal and therapeutic applications might be a valuable complement to the country’s successful medical tourism industry. It was not much of a leap from that to see the potential in recreational marijuana too.
“Welcome to Amsterdam on steroids,” booms Tom Kruesopon, the Thai entrepreneur known here as “Mr Weed” for his role in getting the drug laws liberalised, to a group of German tourists just off the plane, who cannot quite believe what they are seeing. Mr Kruesopon has opened a branch of the US cannabis store Cookies in Bangkok, and runs through the different strains of locally-grown marijuana, each in its own illuminated jar. Weed-themed underwear, slippers and t-shirts are on the shelves.
Perhaps it’s the familiar tales of hapless Westerners locked up for decades in the Bangkok Hilton that make the visitors seem a bit hesitant. But Mr Kruesopon assures them they can no longer be arrested for buying and consuming any part of the marijuana plant in Thailand, though he does not allow smoking in his shop. He believes the business will continue to grow. “You’re going to have a few billion-dollar companies here – I guarantee it.” But he also accepts that better regulation is essential “otherwise you’re going to kill the golden goose”.
Outside of parliament public debate about cannabis is surprisingly muted.
“It’s not ok. It’s still like narcotics to me… Only the youngsters are using it more and those who have used it before are using it again,” says a 32-year-old street vendor. But an older motorcycle taxi driver says legalising marijuana has neither helped nor harmed him: “We’re not paying attention because we haven’t been smoking pot. It doesn’t matter to us anyway.”
Some doctors have warned of the dangers of cannabis addiction, but for most Thais it pales beside the long-standing methamphetamine crisis. Dispensaries in central Bangkok say most of their customers are foreign tourists, not Thais. The most enthusiastic supporters of the new regime are the not insignificant numbers of people in Thailand who were already using marijuana regularly.
Self-styled “stoner” Amanda is one of them. She is happy to be able to cultivate the kinds of strains she likes at home, without fearing a knock on the door from the police. She has turned her small apartment into something like a shrine to the wonder-weed, filling her little bedroom balcony with reflective tents and powerful lights where she carefully tends seven plants. Her cat is no longer allowed in the bedroom.
“It was difficult at first. I had a lot to learn. I didn’t get the temperature right at first, and using air-conditioning 24 hours a day, I need a humidifier. But it is so awesome this happened in Thailand. There are thousands of farms and dispensaries now, so many interesting people in the business.”
For all the talk in Thai political parties of re-criminalising marijuana, or trying to restrict it to medical, rather than recreational use – a distinction those in the business say is almost impossible to make – it seems unlikely that after the last, crazy nine months the cork can be put back in the bottle. But where Thailand’s free-wheeling marijuana industry goes from here is anybody’s guess.
Hello, Globe readers,
We hope you’re having a happy last Friday of April. Today is also the last day for you to receive a free one-month membership to Southeast Asia Globe by taking our survey. We would love to hear from our readers like you.
This week, Singapore carried out its first execution of 2023. Despite concerns over the judicial process and alleged violation of international human rights, the state executed Tangaraju Suppiah, 46, on a conviction of participating in a scheme to traffic cannabis. The state had produced minimal evidence in the case against Suppiah, claiming that he’d been linked to the crime by a pair of phone numbers in the contact list of another man arrested as part of the same crime.
On Wednesday here in Cambodia, the Globe released the third episode of our Anakut podcast on China’s Belt & Road Initiative in the Kingdom. It’s the first episode of our new, narrative reported format, and we hope you like it.
In the meantime, Laos is finally clearing its air with rainfall after three months of hazardous air pollution, and the global primate industry is struggling to account for the global flow of Cambodian macaque monkeys — and their assorted body parts, resold as specimens — after breeders in the Kingdom were rocked by corruption allegations.
Finally, we checked in with Vietnam-based photographer Boris Zuliani to learn more about his quest to produce analogue images in a digitised world and his latest exhibition, WANTED.
That’s all for today, so enjoy this week’s features and have a wonderful weekend.
Globe’s Amanda Oon,
Tangaraju Suppiah was executed on 26 April in the first execution of the year by the Singaporean government despite the public outcry over the unfair trial and violation of international human rights.
Globe’s Anton L. Delgado & Beatrice Siviero
This year, Laos has suffered from exceptionally high levels of air pollution that threatened public health, local businesses, and tourism.
Globe’s Anton L. Delgado, with Rich Schapiro, Anna Schecter, Andrew W. Lehren
As the U.S. demand for macaques for pharmaceutical research increased during the Covid pandemic, illegal wildlife trafficking in Cambodia quickly accelerated.
Globe’s Amanda Oon & Andrew Haffner
Our third podcast episode explored the China Belt & Road Initiative in Cambodia through discussions on the Phnom Penh – Sihanoukville expressway.
James Compton
WANTED is the latest exhibition by Hoi An-based photographer Boris Zuliani whose entire studio is a functioning camera shooting photographic images directly onto glass panes.
A 70-year-old woman who was found dead at her home in Bangkok’s Bang Phlat district tested positive for Covid-19, according to rescue workers and police called to the scene.
A special team from the Ruam Katanyu Foundation, a rescue organisation, arrived at the victim’s house in soi Charansanitwong 40 on Friday along with a forensic doctor from Siriraj Hospital and police from Bang Yi Khan police station after the family reported the woman’s death.
An ATK test on the dead woman returned positive. Her body was handed over to a temple to be cremated after the body was examined and the scene inspected, according to the Ruam Katanyu Foundation.
Four people who lived in the same house also tested positive for Covid-19. They were put under quarantine and given medical care and treatment according to their symptoms.
Dr Theera Worathanarat, a lecturer at Chulalongkorn University’s Faculty of Medicine, on Friday warned people about a surge in Covid-19 infections and urged patients to isolate themselves until their ATK tests are negative.
He wrote on Facebook that those who test positive should isolate for seven to ten days or until the ATK tests are negative, and maintain Covid-19 measures for 14 days.
Citing studies in the US and the UK, the chance of Covid-19 still being transmitted after five days is between 50-75%. This drops to 25-30% after seven days and 10% after ten days.
Meanwhile, the Public Health Ministry stepped up calls on Friday for the elderly to get Covid-19 vaccines or boosters following a surge in Covid-19 infections.
Dr Tares Krassanairawiwong, director-general of the Department of Disease Control, said the number of Covid-19 cases is expected to soar during the rainy season, so vulnerable groups were strongly advised to get jabbed. He said vulnerable groups can safely get flu vaccines at the same time.
According to the WHO’s Weekly Epidemiological Update, the number of new cases decreased globally from March 27-April 23 compared to the previous 28 days.
However, cases and deaths are still rising in Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean regions and in several other countries.
A study of Covid-19 variants showed that from April 3-9, XBB.x was the dominant strain, accounting for 75% of all cases, whereas the XBB.1.16.x variant — which was being closely monitored — made up 4.3%.
Hong Lim Park glowed with candles last April. In the coming days, it may do so again.
In this small leafy corner of Singapore’s Downtown district, the only place in the city-state where authorities allow legal protests, about 400 people gathered against the execution of inmates on the country’s death row. That included 33-year-old Nagaenthran “Nagen” Dharmalingam, an intellectually disabled Malaysian man who had been in prison for more than a decade.
Signs mingled with the lights: “Abolish the Death Penalty”; “Don’t Kill in Our Name”; “Protect Tamil Lives”.
Nagen was hanged that week. Now, almost exactly a year later, Singapore has announced its first death sentence of 2023, that of Singaporean Tamil national Tangaraju Suppiah, who was arrested in 2014 and convicted of playing a role in trafficking a kilogram of cannabis.
He and his family have denied the charge against him. Barring any changes, he will be executed next Wednesday, 26 April.
As other countries in the region move towards abolition of capital punishment, and decriminalisation of marijuana, the Lion City has remained steadfast in its upholding of the death penalty as a deterrent against crime. Activists see the announcement as a sign that Singapore is falling behind on the global human rights landscape and out of step with international standards.
A case full of holes and questions
“When I received the news, my body and mind went into a state of shock and disbelief,” said Tangaraju’s sister Leela. “I felt completely helpless because we don’t even have a lawyer who can speak for us.”
Eight years ago, on 23 January, 2014, her brother was apprehended by police who believed he was linked to two men, “Mogan” and “Suresh”, who had been arrested for coordinating a delivery of cannabis a year earlier. Neither man has been sentenced to death.
Campaigners say the connection appears to depend entirely on two mobile phone numbers, stored in the men’s contact lists under the opaque names “India.jus” and “Apu”, which police found to belong to Suppai. He has maintained that the first number – called by Mogan during the delivery – was one that he’d lost earlier that year. Further, Suppai says the number was for a professional phone, belonging not to him, but the convenience store where he worked. The second was never used by either of the men during the incident.
Neither of the phones were recovered for analysis.
During his police questioning, which took place without a lawyer present, the Tamil native speaker struggled to explain this sequence of events. He requested an interpreter, which was denied, and he claims he failed to fully understand the English language statement read back to him. Later, when he and his family tried to find a lawyer for their criminal motion, no-one was willing to take on the case, fearing personal cost or censure from the court. With no legal training, Suppai decided to represent himself.
“Access to justice is a real problem in Singapore. There is no access to legal counsel during interrogation by the police, and the statements don’t have to be taken verbatim,” said Kirsten Han, a Singaporean journalist and anti-death penalty activist. “So it really comes down to how able the individual is in advocating for themselves and being aware of the potential implications of such statements being used against them in court.”
The High Court found Suppai guilty of trafficking and sentenced him to death on 31 December 2018. He launched an appeal, citing a change in law that meant witness statements should be disclosed to the defence, which had not happened during his case.
The Court of Appeal rejected this attempt on 26 February.
“In my brother’s case, there are so many holes, so many questions and so many questions unanswered,” said Leela. “How can you sentence someone to death with such little evidence?”
A history of capital punishment
Singapore is one of the 55 countries in the world which maintain and implement the death penalty. While capital punishment can be handed out for 33 offences, the overwhelming majority of recent deaths were under minor drug sentences.
Since 1990, anyone caught with more than 500 grams of cannabis or 1,200 grams of opium can be sentenced to hanging under the Misuse of Drugs Act. All of the 11 executions carried out in 2022 in the country were for drug trafficking.
Globally, 35 countries still retain the death penalty for drug offences. Rights organisations have denounced this as a violation of international standards.
Suppai’s drawn-out case happened against a background of liberal progress elsewhere in the region. In April, Malaysia announced it would abolish the mandatory death penalty for 12 sentences, including drug trafficking. Thailand became the first Southeast Asian country to decriminalise cannabis in 2022.
But despite increasingly vocal pushback against capital punishment in Singapore – including a spate of protests and vigils in April last year – a 2021 survey by the Ministry of Home Affairs showed wide support amongst Singaporeans for maintaining capital punishment: 80% of respondents saw it as an effective crime deterrent and 66% viewed it as appropriate for drug trafficking.
However, rights groups contend that there is no proven relationship between capital punishment and deterrence of crime.
“We know the death penalty is not a deterrent for drug offences, and that capital punishment in Singapore disproportionately targets vulnerable people from marginalised communities,” said Maya Foa, director of Reprieve, a human rights non-profit organisation.
“The fact that Singapore has scheduled this execution only weeks after Malaysia’s Parliament voted to abolish the mandatory death penalty underlines how isolated Singapore has become from its neighbours and allies around the world when it comes to the use of the death penalty.”
Singaporean human rights activist and researcher Kokila Annamalai was one of the first people Leela called when she heard the news of her brother’s sentence. For the past year Annamalai has been working with Tangaraju’s family to raise awareness of his case and launch a public campaign for a stay of execution.
“A lot of the people who get arrested for capital charges … tend to be people from very vulnerable backgrounds,” Annamalai told the Globe. “They overwhelmingly tend to be ethnic minorities and non-native English speakers with lower education levels.”
According to Annamalai, this bias is further enabled by a justice system that grants prosecutors a disproportionate amount of power. She explained that after police choose which cases to charge, the prosecution has discretion over the amount of drugs to charge for, which has a direct impact on the severity of their sentence.
“[For] people who come into conflict with the law in these ways, all these things are so arbitrary and so difficult to digest,” she said. “[There were a] couple of other people involved in the delivery, who got different sentences, none of them capital sentences, and some were even discharged.”
Annamalai said that Mogan, the man who police said was caught with the drugs in Suppai’s case, was charged with trafficking in 499 grams, below the capital threshold. That happened even though he was allegedly carrying just short of 1018 grams of cannabis, the amount that Suppai was charged with.
Final days of hope
As Suppai’s final day approaches, a swell of coverage has rippled through the international press. But the mainstream Singaporean media has so far kept him out of the headlines. Annamalai believes that this silence in the press is linked to a wider stifling of freedoms that are set from the top in Singapore.
“There is a very censorious culture here and the death penalty to the [ruling People’s Action Party] government is, I think, a very key component to maintain that relationship of authoritarian control,” she said. “[They] come to depend very heavily on the death penalty as part of their brand of strongman governance.”
This first execution of the year has dashed hopes that Singapore may be following in its neighbour’s footsteps towards an abolition of mandatory capital punishment, Suppai’s family remain steadfast in their own personal battle.
“They’re just hoping that something miraculous will happen, whether on the legal front or in terms of a public campaign,” said Annamalai.
During his final days, they will juggle buying clothes for his final photoshoot with attempts to petition the government and appeal to President Halimah Yacob for clemency.
“They cannot send a man to death just because of some phone numbers they say belong to him,” said Leela. “I appeal to the people to do everything they can to help – please spare my brother’s life.”
While domestic travel in China has caught up with pre-pandemic numbers, outbound travel is experiencing a sluggish recovery.
Nonetheless, industry players are optimistic about a rebound in the next few months.
“China’s outbound travel has recovered by only about 20 to 30 per cent. By May, it’s expected to improve further to 50 per cent. When summer comes, I expect outbound travel to hit 80 to 90 per cent,” said mainland Chinese tour operator Li Cheng.
He added that with an anticipated increase in flight frequencies, more Chinese travellers are likely to visit Malaysia as well as the wider Southeast Asia region.
While Malaysia is gearing up for a surge in mainland Chinese tourist arrivals, some are worried that the tourism industry would not be able to cope, given a lot of players were forced to close during the pandemic.
Those that remain open are struggling with staffing and rising costs.
“Compared to pre-pandemic, we are paying our staff more. Also electricity and utilities are more expensive, the rent as well, basically everything,” said Mr Ng Sin Leong, founder of Mingle guesthouse.
“It is not an issue of lack of workers – there are workers in the market. The problem is lack of management and skilled workers.”
Industry players said they hope the government can do more to help ease the cost of doing business, which has gone up by an average of 30 per cent.
Last year, Malaysia recorded 10.07 million international tourist arrivals who spent RM28.2 billion (US$6.3 billion).
It hopes to more than double that amount next year with a forecast of 23.5 million visitors with some US$17 billion in tourism receipts.
But meanwhile, Malaysia needs to speed up the recovery of its airline, hotels and transportation sectors if it wants to meet its target of generating US$11 billion in tourism revenue this year.
Framed by steel girders and bricks, a floor-to-ceiling glass façade looks onto lotus-strewn wetlands where buffaloes wallow in Hoi An, the ancient trading port of central Vietnam.
As a visitor turns under the beat of high ceiling fans, an outsize 1210mm camera lens stares back at them through the black steel sliding door. This is the Imaginarium of Boris Zuliani, also known as Black Hands Studio, where the entire studio is itself a massive functioning camera shooting photographic images directly onto glass panes as large as 2x2m.
“I like the fact that this is a difficult process, the need for specific chemicals, the precise handling of the glass plates, the need to work fast,” said Zuliani, sharing his fascination with this demanding technique. “We must combat threats of potential failure on so many fronts, so each shot is truly a one-off with its own character.”
He refers to the final creations as ambrotypes, a word of Greek derivation which roughly translates as an “immortal impression”.
Originally from France, Zuliani has been in Vietnam since 2007 honing his obsession with what he calls “light painting”, pushing the envelope of photosensitive materials to create unique textures and tones with his lens. Based in Hoi An, Zuliani is furthering his mission to defy digitalisation of the photographic arts and create something uniquely retro-analogue.
Their current exhibition, WANTED, a series of portraits of Vietnamese workers, is part of that mission. So too is the physical structure of the expansive Black Hands studio, where Zuliani and his team have worked for the past year. There, the lens sits in the door while the subject poses in the main room. Light comes through the lens and onto the glass plate positioned in the darkroom, where the ambrotype is made.
It’s the kind of technique that has helped Zuliani stand out in Vietnam.
Even as he first settled into the photography scene there, his style caught the attention of Nguyen Qui Duc, the creative force behind Hanoian cultural space Tadioto.
The 2009 exposition Les Mots Bleus featured works Zuliani shot on Polaroid film exposed via a self-made pinhole camera, and then enlarged onto canvas which filled the walls at Tadioto’s gallery.
“Over the past 15 years, I have seen Boris continually challenge the limits of his materials. Whether shooting onto polaroid, canvas or glass plates, it’s his exacting professionalism and mad genius innovation that has remained constant as he strives to create his art,” said Duc.
As a journeyman photographer, Ziuliani was initially schooled in high fashion precision camera shoots at Studio Des Plantes in Paris. After several years in the business, his imagination was caught by an encounter in Vienna with The Impossible Project, which sought to promote analogue instant film techniques when Polaroid announced it was shutting down production.
“I suddenly realised that Polaroid film had a limited supply, so I bought 5,000 boxes and found myself at the airport en route to Vietnam,” Ziuliani recalled. “When I arrived in Hanoi, the customs authorities could not understand why I had such quantities of film for my own personal use, so that took a lot of explaining for me to get them into the country.”
While working for fashion assignments in the bustling cities of Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, he continued to pursue his own artistic output on the side – including a series of moody polaroid portraits of lovers on the Gustav Eiffel-designed Long Bien bridge which spans the Red River on Hanoi’s eastern fringe.
This analogue style would help inform his later works at the Black Hands Studio.
In that space, Zuliani’s rangy studio assistant Hugo Armano casts a long shadow in the afternoon light. His sharp eye and organizational acumen holds the operation together and keeps the studio shipshape.
Together the two Frenchmen extract magic from a volatile process approaching alchemy – pouring a stream of collodion by hand to coat individual glass plates before soaking them in a bath of silver nitrate. This is wet plate collodion photography, originally developed by Frederick Scott Archer whose scientific breakthrough in 1848 quickly replaced daguerreotypes and paved the way towards modern photographic techniques.
‘’We named the studio Black Hands because of the chemical residue we would get on our skin,” Armano said, casually noting that one stray drop of silver nitrate could burn through skin in a few seconds.
A very physical series of steps begins with ensuring the plates are perfectly clean before applying chemical reagents in the darkroom. The coated plate is then secured in a sealed wooden box before being loaded into the back of the camera, behind the bellows.
The subject is positionally primed in advance, and after any final adjustments to the framing, the ambrotype is captured onto the glass plate in rich silver and black tones. The end result is an uncanny combination of negative and positive image, which has a varying depth depending at which angle the viewer looks at the finished work.
“We called the current exhibition WANTED partly because the portraits have an element of the American Wild West,” said Zuliani, noting the intersection of that frontier era with the emergence of collodion photography.
The title also reflects the scarcity of supply for artisans and workers with the skills needed to build Kyara Arthouse in central Vietnam, a key partner of Black Hands and the host of its exhibition, as the Covid-19 lockdowns intensified.
“We asked each of them to bring their most important tool with them – you can see such pride in their work etched in their faces,” Zuliani said.
The WANTED collection was shot on 50x50cm glass plates, using a refurbished 150-year-old camera. Initial success with this model found on eBay inspired Zuliani to keep pushing after meeting fellow photographer and skilled carpenter Francis Roux, who had also relocated to Hoi An.
Together they designed an upscaled model, with Roux crafting a bespoke bellows camera housing out of walnut wood, which accommodates a 1x1m glass plate.
‘’Making the 1x1m format camera only made me want to go even further,” enthused Zuliani.
Encouraged by their success, they soon acquired the 1210mm lens to install in the door and expanded to the 2x2m glass plates to complete the Imaginarium – for now.
“We had been working out of such a small garage, so thought why not make the new studio building itself into the housing for a larger-format camera set up,” he said. “It is quite a surreal concept, but when we shoot with the big lens the photographers are inside the camera itself.”
WANTED Photo Exposition: A Collaboration between Black Hands Studio and Kyara Arthouse is on show until May 14th 2023, including over the International Workers Day holidays, at Kyara: 234 Tran Nhan Tong, Cam Thanh Ward, Hoi An, Vietnam.
Web: https://blackhandsstudio.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kyarahoian and Instagram: @kyarahoian @boriszuliani
James Compton is a writer focused on the intersection between arts, culture and nature conservation in Asia. He is based in Hoi An, Vietnam, where he co-manages Kyara Arthouse as a hub for artistic practice and exchange.
Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong has frequently mentioned Australia’s pursuit of” a geopolitical equilibrium” during her flies over the past ten months.
When describing Australia’s Quad and AUKUS partnerships in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore in the middle of 2022, Wong said that Canberra wanted a local arrangement that was” framed by the corporate equilibrium where countries are not forced to purchase but can get their own royal choices.”
On April 17, 2023, Wong made a more direct connection between this quest for equilibrium and the decline of US identity in his National Press Club statement. The United States is still the region’s unavoidable energy, but” the nature of that indispensability has changed.”
We cannot simply leave the Asia Pacific to the US because it is now a multilateral region, according to Wong. To” mainten the region’s balance ,” all the nations in the area must use diplomatic, economic, and other means.
It is understandable for spectators from Southeast Asia to believe that Australia has now found a solution to the problem it has been battling for more than three decades. This sub-region of disparate smaller states and clearly little powers has been actively utilizing the kind of business Wong is now promoting ever since the Cold War ended.
Three tactical truths have guided South Asian strategists’ post-Cold War decision-making: US power and attention are never guaranteed; China is renewed as an aboriginal Eastern power; and the center of global economic power is shifting East and is no longer concentrated in Western developed nations.
There is still strong opposition to the notion that these factors are unavoidable architectural conditions, despite recent changes in American perspectives on each of them. However, the space is getting smaller as people continue to look for business and corporate equilibrium.
American audiences require a better understanding of the persistent tactical transition in the Asia Pacific in order to close this gap. The secret is to understand that the area is departing from a protection order based on the one US hegemony wall that is centered on its hub-and-spokes alliance relationships.
This does not imply that the United States vanishes from view. However, it does imply that the United States is no longer the exclusive tower in the area.
Diversity is amplified as a result of this continued changeover. Whether it is manic or unipolar is not the only factor. Even though great powers are significant, concentrating solely on them misses a key aspect of today’s hyperconnected yet divided society.
Yesterday’s planners deal with difficult issues. Instead of focusing on the issue’s instant manifestation, they should think more broadly. They should identify key nodes and crucial relationships, find various entry points for substantial leverage, and think about how to structure the system to create the best possible resilience.
Great energy behavior and the local equilibrium may be influenced by a wider variety of states and international actors. Security needs to be comprehended more fully, taking environmental decay and epidemics as examples.
Self-help is usually required in this situation, and non-great powers like Australia and Southeast Asia have agency that needs to be effectively tapped.
Australia must make sure that all of this exercise is worthwhile and in the best interests of the country as it joins some local states in taking on more responsibility and using various tools of national power to deliver andnbsp regional security.
Canberra will need to look to others in the area to train business in ways that support and intensify its goals in this order transition as Australia makes a medium-term pivot towards significant investment in alliance partnerships and defense capabilities and technologies.
Here, Southeast Asia’s strengths include 30 years of experimenting with a variety of non-military channels, including institution – and rule-building, comprehensive security, and economic security optimization.
Southeast Asian nations have increased their significance as help states that great energy rivals must compete to win over in the process. The region is home to players who can assist others, whether it be in the form of communicating, leading international organizations, supplying essential minerals, or developing cutting-edge corporate ideas.
Australia perhaps have better opportunities to communicate with China and to help US-Chinese speech if it works with these relatives.
Australia will need to encourage a regional workers division with more partners. Canberra, however, also needs to be sufficiently informed about the various requirements of these local partners in order to maximize the chances of positive benefits.
There are still concerns when it comes to Southeast Asia. Some fundamental ideas are not always understood by the area in the same way that Australians do. For instance, sometimes as many Southeast Asians continue to hope for continued US supremacy, local principles of corporate equilibrium contain an assured leader responsibility for China.
When it comes to dealing with potential US-China dispersion, many Southeast Asian nations do not have the same room for movement as Australia. Their options are constrained by population size, development requirements, and financial trajectories.
However, this does not imply that Australia and Southeast Asia cannot agree on a shared priority for developing or assisting in the construction of necessary protections and methods to prevent the entire region from collapsing.
Australia must begin with a solid understanding of local perceptions and debates on their own terms in order to comprehend these conundrums, their effects on what various South Eastern states are willing to undertake, and avoid becoming biased by asking the right questions or viewing the world through the eyes of others.
Canberra faces the challenge of promptly integrating Southeast Asia strategic planning in light of the pressing need.
The Southeast Asia Institute’s manager and Shedden Professor of Strategic Policy Studies at the Australian National University is Evelyn Goh.
This andnbsp, story, and was originally published by East Asia Forum and are being reprinted with a Creative Commons license.
Chinese industrial firms made lower profits in the first quarter than a year ago as the United States’ “near-shoring” and “friend-shoring” strategy has started showing a negative impact on the Chinese manufacturing sector.
China’s industrial firms’ profits fell 21.4% year-on-year to 1.52 trillion yuan ($220 billion) in the first three months from 1.93 trillion yuan a year ago, the National Bureau of Statistics said Thursday. The year-on-year decline was 22.9% in the first two months of this year.
Of the 413 billion yuan drop in industrial profits in the first quarter, the computers, telecommunication and other electronic equipment sector contributed 20%. The rest was attributable to the chemical, metal and oil refinery industries, which are more sensitive to changes in commodity prices.
Manufacturers of computers, telecommunication and other electronic equipment saw their revenue down 6.4% to 3.24 trillion yuan in the first quarter from a year earlier while their profits contracted 57.5% to 60.73 billion yuan.
Chinese officials concluded that the shrinking profits were a result of weak external demand but some analysts suggested that the problem is more of a structural one.
Zhang Zhongjie, an economist at Huajin Securities, writes in a research report that the export of electronic products has regained its growth momentum in the first quarter of 2023 from the fourth quarter of last year after China ended its zero-Covid policy last December. He says, however, the recovery was slowed by the protectionist US policy.
Zhang Yansheng, chief researcher at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, has recently said on two occasions that the decline in China’s industrial profits was caused by not only a slowing external demand but also the restructuring of the US supply chains.
“At present, the biggest challenge for China’s foreign trade is the decoupling of the Sino-US supply chain,” Zhang says. “In 2018, the US used trade disputes to push forward ‘re-shoring’ and ’near-shoring,’ and now it is promoting ‘friend-shoring’ to achieve its decoupling goal.”
He notes that the US has recently forced its companies to reduce their purchases in China while some traditional foreign customers have also encouraged Chinese manufacturers to relocate to some Southeast Asian and South Asian countries.
“Geopolitics can cause huge and far-reaching damage to the stability of the global supply chain, and this will have a major impact on China’s future foreign trade situation,” he says. “China is now selling more and more intermediate products to South and Southeast Asia, Eastern European and Mexico, which will do the processing and assembly and then ship the end products to the US and Europe.”
Zhang says China can boost industrial profits by strengthening its research and development to fight for high-value manufacturing orders, and also partnering with overseas scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs to sell professional services.
Since the Sino-US trade war began in 2018, US officials have pushed forward a “re-shoring” and “near-shoring” strategy, encouraging companies to produce their goods in Mexico and the US.
In June last year, the Biden administration said it would waive tariffs on solar panels imported to the US from Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam for 24 months. The move provided incentives for Chinese solar panel suppliers to move to these four countries.
Last November, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen visited India to promote the US “friend-shoring” drive, which will also benefit Vietnam and Indonesia.
Meanwhile, other industries performed differently in terms of their profitability during the first quarter.
Automakers recorded a 1.3% growth in revenue to 2.14 trillion yuan but their profits contracted 24.2% to 81.9 billion yuan due to a price war in the sector. In March, their profits climbed 9.1%, in sharp contrast to a decrease of 41.7% in the January-February period.
Many metal suppliers and oil refiners recorded shrinking profits as the selling prices of their products fell faster than their raw materials. The electricity and thermal supplying sector recorded a 49% growth in profit while the electrical machinery and equipment manufacturing sector saw a 27.1% profit growth.
“Overall, the profit drop of Chinese industrial firms remains significant while the scope of profit losses for some companies is large,” NBS statistician Sun Xiao said in a media briefing on Thursday. “Hopefully, the easing of raw material prices will help improve the profitability of Chinese firms.”
Sun added that China has seen some signs of recovery in March when industrial profits dropped only 19.2% year-on-year, compared with a slump of 22.9% in the first two months.
To accelerate the recovery of industrial profits, Sun urged efforts to expand market demand, perk up confidence and give enterprises reason to feel positive about the future.
On Wednesday, the General Office of the State Council issued a circular laying out measures to improve the scale and structure of foreign trade to ensure its stable and high-quality growth.
Governments at all levels should promote the full resumption of important domestic offline expos for better supply and purchase matchmaking, and facilitate cross-border business personnel exchanges, according to the circular.
Efforts will be made to enhance market development services to stabilize exports to developed economies and guide enterprises to further develop markets in developing countries, ASEAN and other regional markets.
The circular came after some Chinese manufacturers said they met fewer buyers from Europe and the US at the Canton Fair, the largest trade show in China, which is being held in Guangzhou between April 15 and May 5.
They said they saw more buyers from Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia and Russia but these customers may provide lower margins.
Read: US sanctions turn away Canton Fair’s Western buyers
Follow Jeff Pao on Twitter at @jeffpao3
SINGAPORE: Singapore’s United Overseas Bank (UOB) reported on Thursday (Apr 27) a 74 per cent surge in core profit in the first quarter from a year earlier on the back of strong net interest and non-interest income growth. The lender’s core profit, which excludes one-off expenses, rose to a recordContinue Reading