Lee Han Gyul‘s music journey hasn’t always being an easy one. From his early days with IM to competing on The Unit and later Produce X 101, where he earned a place in X1, Han Gyul has experienced the excitement of debuting, the disappointment of unexpected endings and the challenge of starting again. His subsequent…
Category: In Conversation with
The A Festival: ATLAS on Finding Their Sound, Growing Together and Bringing T-Pop to Paris – Exclusive Interview
Since making their debut in 2021, Thai boy group ATLAS have come a long way, especially musically. Five years of working together have given them plenty of opportunities to discover their strengths, try different sounds and learn what it takes to keep a group moving forward. Their early releases introduced us to seven young performers…
The A Festival – IRONBOY: “The Most Global Thing You Can Do Is Sound Like Where You’re From” – Exclusive Interview
IRONBOY was only eleven when he first heard Eminem, although by then he was already familiar with performing in front of an audience, having spent much of his childhood entering singing and dancing competitions. Growing up in Ratchaburi, a province in western Thailand, he had started singing at seven and was accustomed to the discipline…
The A Festival: Myyu and Chanya on “AI Girl”, Their First Major Roles and Meeting Their European Fans in Paris – Exclusive Interview
Imagine spending most of your time working, keeping to yourself and having little interest in romance, only for a mysterious package to arrive at your door containing a remarkably lifelike robot who looks exactly like the woman of your dreams. That is the rather unusual beginning of AI Girl, the 2026 Thai Girls’ Love romantic…
The A Festival: New, Pide, PJ and Leon on Bringing “GELBOYS” to Life – Exclusive Interview
A manicure is a promising excuse to spend time with someone you fancy, until you discover they have been taking somebody else along too. That situation sets the relationships in GELBOYS in motion, as FourMod’s attraction to Chian becomes tangled with jealousy, friendship and the involvement of Baabin and Bua. First released in 2025, the…
The A Festival: JASP.ER Open Up About Friendship, Working Together and Creating a Safe Space for Everyone – Exclusive Interview
Thai entertainers Joong, Aou, Santa and Pond, forming JASP.ER have opened the door to a different kind of artistic expression. All four had already established careers in the entertainment industry before coming together as a boy group, but performing music as a team has presented challenges that even years of acting experience could not entirely…
70th BFI London Film Festival: In Conversation with Mokya Shin, Director of “Easter”
A photograph of a young woman posing in a swimsuit with her friends at Dadaepo beach in the 1980s might not seem important, but for South Korean filmmaker Mokya Shin, it changed the direction of Easter, his first feature documentary. The woman in the photograph was Saekja, now 68, who had spent much of her…
70th BFI London Film Festival: In Conversation with Shalini Adnani, Director of “Our Share of Sand”
Shalini Adnani knows what it means to belong to more than one place. Born and raised in Chile in a Sindhi family of Indian origin before later moving to London, the writer-director grew up with different cultures and, as she tells us, “two different value systems”. That experience found its way into her first feature,…
The A Festival: AM8IC on Music, Identity and Their Dark Fantasy World – Exclusive Interview
Watching K-pop from China and then moving to South Korea to train and eventually debut as K-pop artists turned out to be two very different experiences for AM8IC. Mingkai, Roux, Saho, Chungyi and Chen had all admired K-pop artists before becoming trainees themselves, but once the five members were living and training in Seoul, the…
The A Festival: One Role at a Time – TOP Piyawat on Acting, Preparation and What Comes Next – Exclusive Interview
TOP Piyawat describes preparing for a role in practical terms: learning, rehearsing and beginning again. “Every character is different, so I have to start from zero,” he tells View of the Arts. It is a brief answer, but a useful introduction to an actor whose work already includes romantic series, a crime drama and music…
Big Ocean on Their New Single, “Love Sign”, New York Fashion Week and Digital@UNGA – Exclusive Interview
PJ, Chanyeon and Jiseok have spent the past two years doing something no one before them had done in K-pop. As Big Ocean, the industry’s first hard-of-hearing idol group, they have had to find their own ways of singing, dancing, staying in time and performing while experiencing sound differently, but their hearing was never supposed…
The A Festival: ALAMAT on “Sinigang”, Filipino Culture and Their First Performance in France – Exclusive Interview
For ALAMAT, taking their music outside the Philippines has never meant changing who they are to make themselves easier for an international audience to understand, because the Filipino languages, sounds, stories and traditions in their work are not something they add for effect; they are simply part of who the group is. And now, as…
A Sound of His Own: WOW Talks “LOW”, Afrobeats and Going Solo – Exclusive Interview
When A.C.E debuted with CACTUS in 2017, WOW began a journey that would see him spend the next several years performing, making music and growing alongside the other four members. Since then, the group have moved through different sounds and concepts, never really staying in one place for too long, while WOW has built much…
coldrain’s Masato Talks “OPTIMIZE = OPTDEMISE”, Technology and Why Imperfection Matters – Exclusive Interview
After two decades in the music industry, watching the world around him change in ways that once seemed unimaginable, Masato is thinking about imperfection. Not how to eliminate it, hide it or polish it until nobody can see where the rough edges used to be, but whether those rough edges might be among the most…
