Arts & Lifestyle

This article is part of our Design special section about creating space with the look and feel for one person.

Timeless with a bit of magic. That is how the company Lumio describes its small line of lamps and speakers that are designed with smart functionality but also a distinct sense of delight. Max Gunawan started Lumio in 2013 with a portable light shaped like a book that turns on when opened and — voilà! — its accordionlike pages form a sculptural fixture that can be used in various tabletop configurations or hung from a strap.

Relying on Kickstarter campaigns for initial funding, Mr. Gunawan, 43, took an unconventional path in building his venture. Trained as an architect, he founded Lumio with no experience in industrial design or business leadership, driven by a unique and uncompromising idea of the product he wanted. (He persuaded all the panelists in season six of the ABC show “Shark Tank” to make investment offers, though none ultimately panned out.) Lumio’s collection has expanded to include an illuminated Bluetooth speaker that refers to the Japanese art of kintsugi and, most recently, a seesaw-arm desk lamp inspired, in part, by the stabile sculptures of Alexander Calder.

The San Francisco–based company’s products are now sold through some 200 retail outlets in 30 countries.

Mr. Gunawan’s creations are available on Lumio’s site, in select design and gift boutiques, and at a number of museum shops, including MoMA Design Store, the first retailer to offer the Lumio book light.

“You don’t need to be a design expert to appreciate it,” said Emmanuel Plat, MoMA’s director of retail merchandising, who described the book light as having a poetic quality. “It’s just so universal in a way that anybody really can react to it. It’s hard not to have a reaction to it, an emotional reaction.”

He added: “What really sets Max apart is, he has that left-right brain, where he has a design mind and the creativity to create this object but also the know-how, the business mind to finance and produce all of this.”

Mr. Gunawan travels extensively, frequently to Hong Kong, where Lumio has an office, and to Paris, which has become his European base. Increasingly, Paris is also the place he goes to relax and recharge creatively, especially since he completed renovations on a small apartment on the elegant Place des Vosges, the storied 17th-century square in the Marais district that is lined with stately brick-and-limestone townhouses and street-level arcades populated with antiques shops, galleries and cafes. It’s a landmark that has captivated the Indonesian-born Mr. Gunawan since his college days, when he spent a semester in Paris as part of his undergraduate architecture studies at Wesleyan University in the early 2000s.

“I traveled the city and really soaked up the architecture,” he recalled. “I told my friends, ‘Gosh, one day, if I were ever to have a place in Paris, I would want to live in Place des Vosges.’ But it was purely a dream.”

After spending a decade and a half in the Bay Area, working in retail design and then starting Lumio, Mr. Gunawan said, the “slow burn” lure of Paris grew with repeated visits, prompting casual inquiries to a real estate broker. “I told her, ‘You know, if you could find me a semi-fixer upper, because I really want to put a stamp on it,” he said. “It just needs two things: good light and good volume, and that’s it, then I can work out the rest.’”

One day in late 2019, the broker called with a lead on an off-market apartment in the Place des Vosges, a ground-floor one-bedroom overlooking a quiet cobbled courtyard with a parterre garden, but he would have to act quickly. Traveling at the time, Mr. Gunawan informed her he wouldn’t be in Paris for a few months. “She said, Forget about it. That will be gone. You need to go tomorrow,” he recounted. “So I asked a friend to do a videotape walk-through of the place. And guess what? Sometimes I make decisions by impulse, and that’s what happened. I made the offer two days later.”

Totaling a modest 700 square feet, the apartment had generous 13-foot ceilings but was broken up into a series of small rooms. For Mr. Gunawan, certain changes were obvious, such as removing one of the central walls to create an open, continuous space for the living and dining areas and kitchen. But before embarking on renovations he opted to live in the apartment for 18 months, he said, “to get a feel of how I would use it day-to-day, how I want to enjoy my coffee, how the morning light comes in.”

Working with contractors, he designed everything himself, down to the smallest details. Much like the products he has created for Lumio, the results are a marriage of thoughtful simplicity and artful whimsy. The overall feeling is a refined minimalism, exemplified by the subtly shifting palette of grays. In the living areas, Mr. Gunawan used a deep battleship hue for the chevron floors and a lighter dove tone for the fluted paneling that clads the kitchen cabinets and dining table base, while a pale fog-like shade colors the walls.

“I like quiet space that is simple and clean,” Mr. Gunawan said. “It goes back to my school days, how I fell in love with architecture through the work of Tadao Ando. There are still always elements of that simplicity and the gray tones that speak to me.”

The apartment has plenty of moments of playfulness and surprise, starting in the entrance vestibule, where a couple of Japanese lucky cat figurines perch atop the door frame, while a gentle tug along the edge of an arched mirror by Bower Studios reveals a hidden hallway containing a powder room, laundry and coat closet.

Aside from the entry doors, the apartment features almost no handles or pulls (the inconspicuous few that Mr. Gunawan did include resemble small stones made in collaboration with Léa Van Impe, a ceramic artist). Instead, doors and cabinets slide or open with a touch — or, in the case of the dishwasher, with a double knock.

The kitchen was especially important to Mr. Gunawan, an enthusiastic cook who loves the daily ritual of buying food from neighborhood vendors and coming home to make dinner for himself or, occasionally, for a small group of friends. “I never do big parties, but I like to feed people,” he said, describing himself as an introvert at heart. “Four to six guests is my happy place.”

Every inch of the kitchen was meticulously designed. Appliances and storage are concealed behind floor-to-ceiling fluted paneling, while the range and sink are integrated into a niche of charcoal-hued Ceppo di Gré marble speckled with terrazzo-esque flecks of stone. Contrasting Arabescato marble with painterly gray veining was used for an open storage shelf and for the dining table’s top, which doubles as an island work space.

Mr. Gunawan suspended a minimalist Michael Anastassiades mobile-style chandelier above and encircled the table with seven of his favorite chairs, all in black, by designers including Jean Prouvé, Hans Wegner, Faye Toogood and Oki Sato of Nendo. “Chairs are one of the things that I love,” said Mr. Gunawan, who has been designing his own chair for Lumio, to be unveiled this fall. “I was, like, why not make it a variety of them. You think it’s easy to find all those black versions? In some cases, I actually had to beg.”

The living area is anchored by a classic Arflex sofa paired with a two-tone textured-wood cocktail table Mr. Gunawan commissioned from Ferréol Babin, a French designer, plus an Eames plywood chair in fire engine red and a few felted-wool poufs for extra seating. Nearby, Ceppo di Gré shelves, illuminated by recessed lighting, display books, small artworks, design objects and other curios, including a whale sculpture by the illustrator Jean Jullien, a glass candelabra by the artist José Lévy and a donkey’s head made from raffia palm fibers that he picked up at a roadside market in Morocco.

Access to Mr. Gunawan’s bedroom and office is through a door disguised within the kitchen paneling, leading to a low-ceilinged corridor that provides a sensory as well as spatial transition from the public living areas to the private. Here, he tucked the toilet, polished concrete shower and sink — a sculptural monolith of Ceppo di Gré — beneath a loft sleeping area reached by narrow stairs. The rest of the space opens to full height, with views of the garden just outside.

Every inch of storage is utilized, which means floor-to-ceiling closets with tilting clothes racks. Sparely furnished, the room is outfitted with a Bruno Moinard Editions desk and a Frama Triangolo chair (usually softened by a felt Pendleton blanket), where Mr. Gunawan often retreats to think, draw or have his morning coffee. Sometimes he starts his days at the foot of his bed, feet dangling over the side of the loft, where he designed a narrow lap table, deep enough for a notebook or sketch pad.

“It’s where I detach myself,” he said. “This is my niche, my cocoon.”

Being social is not necessarily a top requirement when it comes to achieving success as an artist; plenty of makers have secluded themselves in their studios and produced powerful work.

But Derrick Adams has distinguished himself as an artist who not only depicts the human figure — frequently in paintings that use Cubist-inspired puzzle pieces and a Pop Art-worthy rainbow of color — but one who genuinely likes human interaction, and thrives off it.

“Sometimes you have to just step outside of the studio,” said Adams, 54, on a recent summer morning. “If you’re an artist, you’re making art all the time. Everything is an inspiration.”

Adams’s most frequently used word is “conversation,” which he uses to describe both to talking to people — “I’m constantly in conversation with neighbors when I walk outside” — and also the way his works create a dialogue with the viewer.

Standing in his spacious, white-walled Brooklyn studio, he described how the space is broken up: a loungy front area with couches and a kitchen where visitors and his studio staff can hang out, representing his social side, and then a back area where the work gets made.

“This is my brain,” said Adams, standing in the back by some works in progress. “In the front, that’s my body.”

Adams was preparing for an exhibition in Seoul in a project space at the headquarters of the Korean beauty company Amorepacific. Featuring seven paintings, “Derrick Adams: The Strip” opens Tuesday and was organized by Gagosian gallery.

The gallery will also show three of his works at the art fair Frieze Seoul, which opens Sept. 5, including “Untitled (Musician)” (2024), depicting a bearded man. The Amorepacific presentation is both Adams’s and Gagosian’s first show in South Korea.

Amorepacific’s business makes it an apt venue for Adams. For years, he has been taking pictures of beauty supply stores and wig shops anywhere he finds himself, from Brooklyn to Paris, part of his longstanding interest in what he called “highlighting certain aesthetic principles that are practiced within urban spaces.” In the show’s title, “strip” refers to stretches of beauty supply outlets.

On a table in his studio, there were more than a dozen mannequin heads, of the type seen in beauty shops. The heads were in a variety of skin tones, but all with small, delicate facial features. Adams had planned to turn them into totem-pole-like sculptures for the show, but decided later that they needed more consideration before they were ready.

The paintings for the show were nearby and depicted similar heads topped by wigs, done in his signature manner of interlocking blocks of color, a geometry partly inspired by African masks. Adams combined the painted heads with large areas of molded reliefs designed to look like brick walls, adorned with heart-shaped graffiti; in some spots he had rendered a glint, as if the viewer were looking at the scene through a shop window.

What to some might be quotidian is to Adams worthy of noticing and turning into art.

“Derrick is a powerful storyteller,” said Thelma Golden, the director and chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem. “His works are evident of the breadth and complexity of the stories that define Black life, past and present.”

Adams said that for the Amorepacific show, he had been thinking about “this ritualistic practice of adornment being a very exposed thing, and very participatory.”

He added, “It’s a conversation about the history of Black culture as it relates to being a consumer — and being consumed.”

The ongoing series has two major creative inspirations: the work of Romare Bearden — whose 1971 work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art “The Block” shows brick buildings amid a sprawling neighborhood scene — and the creations of the fashion designer Patrick Kelly, for his pioneering exploration of “Black femininity,” Adams said.

The artist Mickalene Thomas, a close friend of Adams for some 30 years, said that the construction of his paintings was a key part of their appeal.

“He has a great way of juxtaposing geometries, shapes and color to create a depth of field,” Thomas said. “He has you enter into the work and then you feel like you’re part of the narrative.”

Among contemporary Black artists, Adams occupies a distinct area in terms of subject matter and tone. He has carefully defined the terms of his work and he does not use his platform for decrying society’s ills.

“You go into a museum, most Black artists are making work that talks about the repressive culture of colonialism and what Black people have to experience,” Adams said. “I don’t think that Black people need to go into a museum to see something they experience outside of the museum.”

In the past, critics and curators have associated him with the idea of “Black joy,” but he said that the phrase itself was complicated.

“My work is joyful, I’m having fun doing it, but that flattens it out,” Adams said of the phrase, which for him does not mean a happy-talk optimism that ignores problems.

“The idea of being Black and joyful is political — to assert it, to demand it,” he said. “It’s something that you have to take and not something that is given.”

In his mind, that is not at odds with his frequent inclusion of humorous elements in his work. In his studio, there was an in-progress painting of a grinning Black man who appeared to be baked into a pie — literally, with his head sticking out of one end and his feet the other — which was set on a Fourth of July-themed picnic tablecloth. It was a slightly surreal but also strangely wholesome scene.

“He brings a sense of humor and absurdity,” Thomas said. “You think, ‘He didn’t just do that did he?’ Oh yeah he did.”

Adams was born and raised in Baltimore, and later created a Baltimore-focused nonprofit, Charm City Cultural Cultivation, that includes an artist’s residency.

He moved to New York in 1993, eventually receiving his B.F.A. from Pratt Institute and M.F.A. from Columbia. “I knew my purpose in coming to New York was to be an artist,” he said.

For 13 years Adams had a day job at the nonprofit space Rush Arts, which highlighted Black and African diaspora artists. He started as gallery manager and became curatorial director, helping other artists develop their careers, writing grants and mounting shows — not something on the résumé of every top contemporary artist.

“My whole foundational structure is working at an organization that didn’t sell art,” Adams said of the way it framed his career, putting commercial concerns second.

He said he was never much of a careerist: “Everything I’ve been able to obtain as an artist has not been through any type of strategic planning.”

Golden recalled that she got to know Adams when he was working at Rush Arts, but also making his own work on nights and weekends and showing it at alternative spaces. She was already an influential curator, then at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

“He often would speak to me about other artists he thought I should see,” Golden said. “But I don’t remember him ever during that time speaking about his own work.”

As a successful midcareer artist today, Adams is sought after by museums to do special projects, but he often does more than just ship out a work.

For a monumental wall mural at the Milwaukee Art Museum called “Our Time Together” (2021), Adams traveled several times to Milwaukee to create the work — which is part painting and part photomontage — meeting with people and delving into local history.

The work incorporated local images from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as other scenes of Black life in the area. “I looked for the most empowering imagery,” Adams said.

Marcelle Polednik, the Milwaukee museum’s director, said that “Our Time Together” was a “catalytic work” for the institution because of “how intimately it is tied to a sense of place.”

She added, “It’s not unusual for people to come in and recognize a family member in the mural. It provided a different way of engaging in community history beyond our walls.”

For Adams, face-to-face engagement — both in making the art, and then showing it — is core to who he is.

“When I have a show in a city, I try to learn the city,” he said. “An important part of my work is bringing in Black audiences and diversifying who sees art.”

In 2023, the dealer Mariane Ibrahim made a radical move in today’s art world: She did not participate in any art fairs, anywhere.

“We took a hiatus,” said Ibrahim, who has galleries in Chicago, Paris and Mexico City and specializes primarily in artists of African descent. “It was great. We’re in such a machine, I wanted to slow down a little bit.”

But now she is back, exhibiting at Frieze Seoul as she did in 2022, when it was brand-new.

The fair’s third edition runs Sept. 5-7 in the Coex convention center in Seoul, and features 117 galleries from 32 countries, from Vietnam to the republic of Georgia.

Ibrahim’s booth will feature the painting “Marco (Polo Boys)” (2024) by Ian Micheal, who lives in Oakland, Calif., and works by the painter Ian Mwesiga, of Kampala, Uganda, and the Tokyo painter Yukimasa Ida, among others.

So why did Ibrahim return? “I’m grateful for fairs, they’re an important showcase,” she said. “I wouldn’t be where I am without them.”

She added, “But it’s OK to question and take a break. It allows you a level of reinvention.”

One lesson she has learned over the years is not to rehang her booth each day for variety’s sake, as some galleries do.

“This way, people can say to their friends, ‘Hey did you see that painting?’” Ibrahim said. “I think it’s frustrating if it changes every day.”

Variety will not be in short supply in the Coex center. Frieze Seoul runs concurrently in the same venue with Kiaf, a fair put on by the Galleries Association of Korea that has some 200 dealers. Tickets are combined, giving visitors access to both fairs.

The larger context of the South Korean art scene is notably busy.

“We also have two biennials at this time,” said Patrick Lee, Frieze Seoul’s director. He was referring to the Busan Biennale and the Gwangju Biennale, taking place in their respective South Korean cities and overlapping with the fair.

“It’s mutually beneficial,” Lee said of the confluence of the fair and the noncommercial exhibitions. “It brings a few extra museum curators to us, and they are ecstatic to be on hand.”

This year, 64 percent of the Frieze galleries are based in Asia or have a space there, and Lee said that was the key factor that distinguishes the fair from the competition around the world.

“The last thing I want to do is make it the same as other fairs,” Lee said.

The Frieze Masters section of the fair, for older and historical art, has 19 galleries this year.

“We’re particularly pleased this year to have many galleries from across the region showing historical Asian art,” said Nathan Clements-Gillespie, the director of Frieze Masters.

He said that time-tested works may also be seen as a hedge when the market is not at its hottest.

“The material that Frieze Masters offers is a certainty throughout time,” Clements-Gillespie said. “There’s a confidence in knowing that you’re buying an object whose value has grown steadily over 600 years.”

The Masters section at Frieze Seoul includes the gallery DAG, with spaces in New Delhi and Mumbai, India, which is participating for the first time.

“It’s part of a larger business strategy to be in key markets,” said Ashish Anand, the chief executive and managing director of DAG. “We thought we should try it.”

DAG — which formerly had a New York branch and will again when it can find the right space, Anand said — is presenting a solo booth of Sohan Qadri (1932-2011), known for his intensely colored abstractions. The Indian-born artist lived in Copenhagen for some 30 years in the latter part of his career.

The booth will feature a series of Qadri’s untitled works on paper made with ink and dye. He frequently used knives and other tools to scar the surfaces of his pieces.

“His works are inspired by yoga and meditation — there’s a high level of spirituality in what he did,” Anand said.

The choice of Qadri for Frieze Masters was strategic. “He has truly global appeal,” Anand said. “We wanted to play it safe.”

He added that the price tags of the offerings — mostly ranging from $40,000 to $100,000 — were also deliberate.

“We’re purposely not bringing million-dollar paintings,” Anand said. “We wanted to bring something at an attractive price point.”

Showing at any fair is a logistical challenge, especially when it is not in a gallery’s home city. But DAG is also showing at the concurrent Armory Show in New York, running Sept. 6 to 8.

Like Frieze Seoul, the Armory Show is owned by Frieze’s parent company, the sports and entertainment conglomerate Endeavor.

“We’ve never done that before,” Anand said. “We’re sending one team to New York and one team to Seoul.”

Luckily, he added, DAG has 150 employees to facilitate multiple fairs. Then, in just over a month, DAG will be participating in Frieze Masters in London, too.

Frieze Seoul’s main section will include many global powerhouse galleries that have spaces all over the world, including Gagosian, Pace Gallery, Hauser & Wirth and David Zwirner.

Included in that group is White Cube, with galleries in Seoul and Hong Kong in addition to London, Paris and New York.

The White Cube booth will feature the painting “Tesseract #7” (2023) by the New York artist Howardena Pindell; “Still Life (medical cabinet) III” (2024), made of steel and handblown glass, by Mona Hatoum, who was born in Beirut, Lebanon, and now lives in London; and the oil “Anthill” (2023), by the Brazilian artist Marina Rheingantz, who lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.

Wendy Xu, the director of White Cube’s Hong Kong gallery who also oversees its broader Asian operations, said that Frieze Seoul had been “quite positive for us, with lots of serious buyers.”

But she was most impressed by the savvy of the locals who attend.

“People come by and they know who the artists in the booth are — they’ve previously studied online,” Xu said. “As an exhibitor, I find that amazing. They’ve done their homework.”

Leeahn Gallery — with spaces in Seoul and the southeastern city of Daegu, where it was founded — is presenting a selection of works meant to highlight a dialogue between the country’s artistic generations. Lee Kang-So, 81, is represented by the oil “Serenity-221256” (2022) and Kwangho Lee, 42, by the enameled copper work “Dissolve 19-24 #1” (2024).

Hongwon Lee, Leeahn’s associate director, said the gallery was focused on collaborations with galleries all over the world in the service of making the artists it represents better known.

“Now that the global market is going through a period of stagnation, we’re trying even harder to promote our artists overseas and collaborate overseas,” Lee said.

She gave the example of meeting White Cube’s founder, Jay Jopling, at the first edition of Frieze Seoul, which led to a show of the Leeahn artist Lee Jin Woo at White Cube’s Hong Kong gallery (closing Sept. 7).

“It’s the best way to nurture our artists and bring them to the next level,” Hongwon Lee said. “Whether the market is slow or good, we have to work together.”

The Tokyo gallery Kosaku Kanechika has its own version of togetherness, presenting two ceramists in dialogue: Takuro Kuwata from Gifu, Japan, and Dan McCarthy of New York’s Hudson Valley.

“Takuro works in bright and vivid colors, and Dan is playful and almost comical,” said Kanechika, who founded his namesake gallery in 2017. “We’re presenting a very modern version of ceramics.”

The booth includes McCarthy’s multicolored “Glaze Tester FacePot, 3 Birds” (2024) and Kuwata’s “Tea Bowl” (2024), a mauve vessel painted with dissolved gold.

It is the kind of combination that might get a collector to ask for further information on the artists.

And, though it has been two years since she last showed in Seoul, Ibrahim, who is returning to the fair post-hiatus, remembers those kinds of conversations from that initial Frieze Seoul.

“There was a poetic curiosity about the work,” she said of the people who stopped by the 2022 booth. Ibrahim had an idea about what motivated that inquisitive spirit, which came right after the worst phase of the Covid pandemic had just ended.

“Beauty is the answer to all of our problems and trauma,” she said.

Maybe the love of your life is just one swipe away — give or take 500 miles.

That’s the bet some people are making on dating apps when they set their location to a city, state or country that is miles (or even an ocean) away from their actual location, all in hopes of broadening their romantic prospects.

After Lydia Karakyriakou’s long-term relationship ended more than a year ago, she said she felt as if the single men she was seeing on dating apps in Glasgow, where she is from, had either previously dated a friend or had a known dating history among her social circle.

“I just was bored of the same people,” Ms. Karakyriakou said. “I wanted something fresh.”

Using Hinge, Ms. Karakyriakou began searching for matches in and around London, since she would often travel to the city as part of her work as a content creator.

She later ended up matching with a man in Manchester, England, and going on a date with him. She now lives there. “It was so refreshing to be in a city that I’m not used to, go to new places, be with someone that I’ve never seen before and nobody that I knew knew of them,” she said. (Ms. Karakyriakou, who was a contestant on Season 9 of the popular reality dating show “Love Island,” says it’s a plus whenever a match isn’t too familiar with her.)

Most major dating apps offer some version of virtual location hopping. Tinder allows users to like and match with others in different destinations via its Passport Mode, which is available with a paid premium subscription to the app. Hinge lets users change their “neighborhood” at no additional cost. And private, membership-based apps like Raya make it possible to match with people all over the world.

In the short term, expanding your dating pool might seem like a good idea. But what if you hit it off with someone two time zones away? Are you willing to undertake the journey of a long-distance relationship? Or potentially move away from your home, job and friends to be closer to the person?

During the Olympics last month, users on TikTok were playfully encouraging one another to change the locations on their Tinder profiles to Paris in hopes that they might match with an Olympic athlete and fall in love. It’s also common for people to use it while traveling for work, vacation or while visiting their hometown (you never know!).

In general, the experience of using a dating app in big cities may look quite different from the experience of users in small towns or suburbs. Combine that with the fact that social media makes it easier to stay connected with people abroad, and it’s easy to see why the grass might be greener elsewhere.

For Milly Rodriguez, 38, moving from New York City to Atlanta for her job with Delta Air Lines last year meant changing her dating app locations from the Brooklyn dating scene she had grown accustomed to. But not immediately.

“I had heard such horror stories of dating in Atlanta,” she said.

Ms. Rodriguez moved to Georgia in early December but kept her location on dating apps set to New York in hopes that she could continue making connections there. In January, once she realized that this might make socializing in her new home difficult, she changed her location to Atlanta.

“I used that as a way to meet people and start dating,” she said. “But I was not looking forward to doing that at all.” (In an amusing twist, she said she comes across many people who are former New Yorkers or who live in New York but are planning to move to Atlanta.)

Some might view this practice as being disingenuous, but Ms. Karakyriakou and Ms. Rodriguez, who are both currently single, said they let their matches know that they didn’t reside there.

According to Jared Freid, a 39-year-old comedian and co-host of the dating podcast “U Up?,” this is known as hoodfishing, a coinage — though not his own — referring to people claiming to be from the city they are dating in but really are living somewhere else entirely.

“Men generally change their location to hook up,” explained Mr. Freid, whose TikTok video on the topic made waves online this month. “And women are generally changing their location to find better dating scenes.”

Mr. Freid, who lives in Manhattan, said that withholding your actual location from a match until the last possible second is poor form. He recalled letting a match know that he was down the street from her current location, in the meatpacking district, implying that they should meet. She then revealed that she wasn’t actually a neighborhood resident.

He said that this kind of geographic bait-and-switch raises the stakes on what might have otherwise been a chill date, to dubious effect.

“Everyone thinks their town is the worst town for dating, but what you also find out is that there is no Garden of Eden out there where dating is great for anyone,” he said.

On a bright summer morning, the Irish-born artist Sean Scully interrupted a small watercolor for a conversation at his sunlit London atelier. The half-finished abstract rested on a trestle table among paint tubes and empty hummus tubs that they had been squeezed into.

Leaning against the walls were large new oils featuring colorful grids and stripes. Though abstract, they somehow evoked the rich scenery of North Africa; one was titled “Fez,” after Morocco’s second city.

Scully is showing several new paintings at the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Seoul as part of “Soul,” an exhibition that is to open on Tuesday, just before Frieze Seoul kicks off. And starting Oct. 29, Lisson Gallery in New York will present paintings he made in New York in the early 1980s.

Scully was born in Ireland in 1945 and moved to London when he was 4, settling with his family in a slum. “It was absolutely dire,” he recalled that morning, in an interview at his studio.

The family soon moved in with young Sean’s loving and incredibly resourceful grandmother; he attended a Catholic school with strict but caring nuns. But when the family bought a house in south London, the little boy suddenly found himself in a vicious environment. “There was nothing except fighting, stealing cars, being in a gang and hoping not to get smashed up too often,” he said.

Young Sean became “the baddest boy in the school.”

“I disobeyed the law,” he said. “I walked on the wrong side going up the stairs and banging people.”

To an extent, that pugilistic side is still there, Scully acknowledged. “Our childhood selves remain,” he said. “I won’t bend the knee for anyone.”

In his teens, he became an apprentice in a printing workshop then a graphic design studio, discovered art, and never looked back. He attended art school in Croydon, in south London, embracing the experience “like somebody who had a religious calling,” then went to Newcastle University. While still a student at Newcastle, he drove a van down to Morocco — wanting to see what Matisse saw — and was entranced for life.

The following conversation has been edited and condensed.

Why did Morocco make such a big impression?

I liked the people. I liked the exotic patterns, the tents on the beach, the stripes all going in different ways.

In Morocco, everything was without borders. There were no boxes containing activity: Everything was all over the place. Carpets were on the wall and on the floor. Tiles were on the wall and on the floor. They were inside, they were outside. People wore djellabas and walked around looking like the walls. It was the geometry of ecstasy.

Not long after your trip to Morocco, you embraced abstraction. Can you talk about that?

First of all, we have to recognize that 50 percent of the world makes abstraction. So it’s not peculiar, and it’s been around for a very long time. I’m part of that, in a certain way. However, I combine it with the pathos of Western painting.

In my work, you have associations with the horizon, with blood, with earth, with gray mist, with the sky in the morning and the sky at night, and then this very somber black bar, which is about finality.

I want a feeling in the painting, so it’s borderline religious. I want everybody in the world to be able to feel that comfort or that love.

You’ve said that American abstract artists can’t achieve this effect. Why not?

Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Ryman and Barnett Newman can’t paint like this, because they’re not European. They didn’t live the life that I lived. They didn’t come from Ireland. All of that is in the painting.

A painting has to be like a person. It has to have a personality and a character and a love and structure in it, a kind of ethical quality. I allow my paintings to be associational and metaphorical.

You left London for New York in 1975. How was that?

People said to me at the time: “Manhattan will kill you,” and I said, “That’s OK, because I’ve already been killed.” When you’re Irish, the metaphor is, you’ve got a boot on your head for 800 years.

New York was like a Cormac McCarthy novel: unbelievably brutal. I had to fix up my loft on 18th Street myself, learn how to do everything. I did construction work, carried sheets of Sheetrock up the stairs.

I stayed because I felt that I had been somewhat slighted in London, and I’m not the right person for that.

In New York, I met people who were unbelievably loyal to me, who gave me a kind of love that was visceral, which I’d never had before.

You’re now based in London, but you’re in New York a lot. Are you moving back to New York at some point?

I’ll never leave New York. I love New York, and I owe it everything.

Given a choice between back-stabbing and front-stabbing, I prefer the latter, and front-stabbing is what you get in New York. If somebody wants to smash you up, they want the authorship, they want the credit. Whereas in London, it’s death by a thousand cuts. So New York suits me.

You lost a son in a tragic car accident in 1983, and often speak about grief. You disagree with people who say that time is the great healer.

They’re all liars. They’re just saying things to escape the dreadfulness of it.

You maybe find ways of putting grief into different activities, compensating for it by saving somebody else. But it’s not honorable to get over it. The person has to live in you. You’re what keeps that person alive. If you get over it, they’re abandoned. Their spirit is abandoned by you. So in a way, I don’t want to get over it.

Are you in a place of contentment now, or, like so many artists, in a state of permanent interrogation and anguish?

I’m very confident about what I am in the art world. I’m very aware of my position. But the things in me that caused me to make art will be in me for 500 years. The furnace in me rages. It doesn’t even need anything to be thrown into it.

Dear Tripped Up,

Last Oct. 10, my wife, a friend and I arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport to fly to Paris on a trip we had originally planned for April but had to postpone. At the United Airlines check-in counter, agents told us our reservation had been canceled — by us! Even weirder, the same thing had happened three weeks earlier, when the airline sent us an email saying we had canceled our trip. That time, we called and insisted United reissue the reservation for the same price, which it did by giving us a travel voucher and instantly redeeming it. At the airport, though, we watched as supervisors got their supervisors involved, and we were eventually told that something about the voucher had raised questions about fraud. We missed our flight and bought last-minute tickets for that evening’s 11 p.m. United flight to Paris. Then that flight was canceled, though this time for everyone. Given the day’s stress and frustration, we gave up on the trip, had dinner and went to the airport Marriott before heading home the next morning. We believe United owes us for the cost of the last-minute flight ($4,475), a portion of the earlier canceled flight ($3,099), the cost of our transportation, hotel and meals that day ($1,178) and the money we lost on nonrefundable plans in France ($2,007). Can you help? Connie, Towson, Md.

Dear Connie,

Have you ever tried to solve a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle that someone put through a wood chipper? Me neither, but now I know how that might feel.

Still, I think I’ve got it — a trying tale not just of United, but one of a Google search gone wrong, a badly timed shoulder injury, an accusation of fraud, a miscalculated credit card chargeback, unwarranted credit and a New Jersey-based travel agency with a bone to pick and an owner who answers to the name of “Alec Baldwin.”

This specific loony sequence of events is unlikely to befall other travelers, but other loony sequences will, and there are lessons to be learned here — because every party involved shares some blame.

It’s easiest to explain chronologically, so let’s turn back the clock to January 2023, when you reserved your original April flight on what you thought was a phone call with United. It wasn’t. Instead, a click you made on a Google ad led you to call a travel agency named The FareHub, which, you said, did nothing to disabuse you of the notion that you were speaking with United. (I wrote about dubious travel websites earlier this month.) The FareHub issued your tickets via email, in a format generic enough you didn’t notice the difference.

Only in March, when a member of your party hurt her shoulder and you called (the real) United to postpone the trip did you discover The FareHub was involved. It was a United agent who explained that two of the January charges on your credit card statement, to “United Air” and totaling $10,659, were not to United at all. (This might be a good time to remind everyone that we should all regularly examine our statements.)

The total was some $4,000 more than you thought it should be. But when you called back the number you now realized was The FareHub to question the charges, you said an agent hung up on you. You called United again and spoke to the fraud department, who suggested you contact Chase, your credit card issuer, to try to recover what you had lost.

This is the debacle’s inflection point. Following the United agent’s advice, you asked Chase for a chargeback on what you claimed were fraudulent charges and were refunded the full $10,659. But that wasn’t right: Even though The FareHub did perhaps overcharge you, the company did purchase you tickets.

The FareHub is a brand of a company named Viajar Solutions, which is based in New Jersey with a call center in India. The FareHub’s site describes itself as “a legitimate travel company that is based in USA.” Its online reviews are few, poor and reflect your experience almost precisely, and a Google spokesman told me that the site has been suspended for months from its Google Ads program for violating company policy on misrepresentation.

When I later contacted The FareHub, I was routed to Abhinav Rasgotra, who identified himself as the company director and insisted the full charges were correct. He also asked if I would refer to him in this story as “Alec Baldwin,” his nickname in the United States. I declined.

Chase would not comment on the record about this case, but typically credit card companies weigh evidence from both parties in deciding these requests; Mr. Rasgotra told me he would send me the evidence he sent to Chase, but has not. Regardless, given that you were still planning to take the trip, you should have requested only a partial chargeback, not the full amount. You say you later contacted Chase to say you had received too much.

When The FareHub saw the chargeback, representatives tried to contact you by phone in March and then sent an email suggesting they would take legal action. “As there is no response on the call,” it said, “we have forwarded this dispute case to our Legal Advisor Alec Baldwin.” You didn’t respond.

A United spokeswoman, Erin Jankowski, told me the airline was unaware you got the refund from Chase, which explains why you were issued electronic certificates — vouchers, for future travel — on May 20. They appear to have been for around $4,600, since, that same day, when you booked your new reservations for October, United only charged your credit card $3,099 out of the total $7,694.

So these new reservations were funded both by you and (from an accounting perspective, at least) by The FareHub. “They used our money,” Mr. Rasgotra said.

That is what led to those two mysterious cancellations: An enraged Mr. Rasgotra told me The FareHub canceled your flights to prevent you from spending their money.

It’s a bit unclear how The FareHub was able to do so, as you had booked the reservations directly through United. Mr. Rasgotra said The FareHub still had access to the new reservation, because the travel certificates United issued were connected to your original reservation and thus issued to The FareHub in your name. United had a different explanation involving a compromised MileagePlus account, but it doesn’t matter: One way or the other, on Sept. 20, The FareHub was able to cancel your October reservations.

That’s when you called to have United reissue those tickets, and the way the carrier did that was to issue yet another electronic travel certificate to you, for the total value of the tickets, $7,694, and then use that certificate to rebook the same flight for Oct. 10.

Once again, The FareHub could see this, and once again it canceled the reservation. But this time, United told me, The FareHub likely changed the email address associated with the reservation, which might explain why you arrived to the airport on Oct. 10 without knowing the reservation was canceled.

So who owes what to whom?

Let’s start with an easy one, that last-minute flight that you purchased on Oct. 10 for $4,475. It was canceled by the airline, and U.S. Department of Transportation rules are clear here. United owes you, and the carrier told me it has now reimbursed you that amount.

You also asked for $1,178 for the two rooms at the airport Marriott plus dinner and transportation. But lost in the back and forth was that United had already sent you a total of $900 for your expenses, which doesn’t cover the costs but, to me, seems reasonable.

Now for the $2,007 for those canceled plans in France: You’re out of luck. Airlines will reimburse passengers for travel expenses they missed out on only in the most extreme circumstances. Typically, that’s a job for travel insurance.

That leaves us with the $3,099 you charged to your card on May 20, to book your flights through the real United. That money, according to United, was subsequently used by The FareHub for other customers.

I wonder why United won’t take the blame for allowing that to happen and return you the $3,099, considering you never flew and the issue happened months after the carrier might have known that there were issues with The FareHub. United did not respond to my request for comment on this.

What can we learn from your debacle? It’s unfortunate that your Google search went astray, leading you to a poorly rated middleman that you didn’t want to use in the first place. The most obvious lesson is to take care to avoid sponsored links and click only on a company’s official website. But your inadvertent error kicked off a fiasco that also gives us an opportunity to consider chargebacks, and to issue a warning to anyone contacting their credit card company and declaring fraud.

Asking for chargebacks, particularly those for high amounts, should not be seen as a default strategy but as a nuclear option. So exhaust every conventional complaint weapon in your arsenal before you go there.

Why? Companies will stop negotiating with you directly once you get the credit card company involved; they consider chargebacks a declaration of war. They only work when the traveler is 100 percent correct. Therefore, be very sure you are right — that you understand your rights and have your math straight, asking for the precise amount you were overcharged. I have seen so many occasions where this backfires, as nothing irks companies more than a chargeback, and like The FareHub, they often attempt to respond in kind.

If you need advice about a best-laid travel plan that went awry, send an email to [email protected].

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There is a scene in the 2023 film “Past Lives” in which Nora Moon, the protagonist, calls Hae Sung Jung, her childhood friend, “really
masculine, in
this
way
I
think
is
so
Korean.”

When I first heard that dialogue, I remember jolting to attention. It felt like the movie was going out of its way to label an Asian man as manly. I had never heard that kind of talk on the big screen before.

And, if I’m being honest, it made me, a Korean American man, feel good.

I knew there was more I wanted to unpack, and doing so falls into my jurisdiction as a reporter on The New York Times’s Culture desk. So I was delighted when The Times’s Projects and Collaborations team asked me if I’d be interested in writing about the representation of Asian American men — and specifically their romantic roles — onscreen.

Asian and Asian American men have been emasculated and marginalized for decades on American screens, and I wanted to chronicle the modest, but meaningful, shift happening right now. The article, which was published online today alongside visuals from Ricardo Nagaoka, explores how roles available to Asian and Asian American actors have evolved, especially over the last few years.

I spoke to almost two dozen Asian Americans: Mostly actors, writers and directors, but also scholars, historians and everyday people. I needed to understand how laws and immigration policy — and especially pop culture — had shaped America’s view of Asian men. And I was interested in how the years of unflattering Hollywood portrayals made Asian and Asian American men feel.

Surveys from the 2000s and 2010s had concluded that Asian men, along with Black women, were at the bottom of the racial romantic hierarchy when it came to dating in real life. And the frustration felt by Asian American men in that realm has at times manifested itself in misplaced toxicity, anger and resentment — particularly toward Asian women.

As a result, the romantic prospects of Asian men has become a sort of taboo topic that I have discussed only privately, with close Asian American friends. But I hoped that people would share their own experiences and perspectives for an article.

When they did, our conversations felt both freeing and affirming. It turned out that even some of Hollywood’s biggest — and most conventionally attractive — Asian American stars had had similar conversations with their own friends, and had, at times, felt less than.

“There’s a part of me that’s terrified to talk about this,” said the actor Justin H. Min, who starred as a romantic lead in “The Greatest Hits” this spring. He summed up a sentiment that I heard a lot: “It brings up such deep-seeded emotions in all of us that come from a history of pain and a history of feeling like we’re not wanted.”

When I called William Hung of “American Idol” fame, he said the quiet part out loud: “I portray Asian stereotypes,” to some people, he said. “I have buck teeth. I’m a bit chubby. The way I look, I’m like a nerd.”

It is hard to pinpoint what role, if any, the characters we see onscreen play in how we as Asian American men are perceived, how we perceive others or how we feel about ourselves. But some actors, writers and directors argue that it all does affect the audience, as well as our culture.

Take Alexander Hodge, known to some as the “Asian Bae” from “Insecure.” He said children sometimes called him “Jackie Chan” when he was growing up, in part because there were no other cultural touchstones they could point to. As an adult, being perceived as a desirable man on a widely seen TV show was initially “quite difficult to comprehend,” he said.

Nonetheless, he made it clear that he was still “incredibly grateful” that the moniker came into being, because “it builds that cultural lexicon that ‘Asian Bae’ now exists.”

I had the opportunity to hear from Times readers on the subject, too. Almost 200 Asian American men responded to a Times questionnaire asking how they felt about Hollywood’s depiction of them, and about their romantic lives.

Not all of the respondents believed that media representation affected them. Some said they grew up in majority Asian communities that they thought insulated them from prejudice. A few argued that much can be overcome through confidence.

But Eric Tanyavutti, 42, of Chicago, was among the many respondents who said they felt overlooked by mainstream American media.

“For a long time I wanted to be white because that was the ideal — that meant that I could get all the girls and that I would be popular,” he told me in an interview. “As an Asian American man, I just did not exist, except in kung fu movies.”

Another response, and follow-up interview, also stayed with me.

Julian Djangkuak, 21, of Fairfax, Va., said he first saw a glimmer of himself onscreen when he saw Henry Golding in a trailer for the 2018 rom-com “Crazy Rich Asians.” Djangkuak, who is Indonesian, and Golding, who is Malaysian, share a skin tone, a nose and other facial features. And, as Djangkuak could plainly see, Golding was handsome — sexy, even.

Djangkuak — who said he had at times used shoe insoles to make himself taller, and that he had once researched how to use clips to pinch and narrow his nose — told me that as he began to see more and more people in pop culture who reminded him of himself, he had also begun to realize that he could not change fundamental attributes about who he was.

“You can’t be perfect,” he said. “But I have to put myself out there.”

I have given myself similar pep talks over the years. What Hung said about himself, and about Asian stereotypes, I have also sometimes felt. And now, after reporting this piece, it is a comfort to know that even some of Hollywood’s most successful Asian American men — the ones who seem to have it all figured out — think about these things, and feel them, too.

In the stairwell of Electric Lady Studios a few weeks ago, Harrison Patrick Smith, 28, was handed a coat hanger carrying an unassuming pair of pants and a T-shirt. “Oh, my street clothes!” he said and laughed, subtly pumping a low fist by his side. “Yes!”

Smith, who records dance rock he characterized as “electroclash revival” with a “supersized attitude” as the Dare, isn’t always in his signature crisp black suit, and doesn’t always prefer it. But you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise, as he’s been spotted in it a lot lately: performing live, attending fashion shows, filming music videos, at parties.

“All of my musical heroes typically commit to the bit, and are larger than life, and the music is never secondary,” Smith explained earlier that day. “The bit” — in this case, the suit — “furthers the story of the music, or piques the interest or the imagination of the listener even more.”

He referenced David Bowie’s Thin White Duke persona. “If he was just wearing a T-shirt and jeans, would he be David Bowie? And would you even like the music as much?” Smith continued. “If there wasn’t that lore around the music, would you even like any of it?” he asked, not without earnestness.

Nearing the release of his debut album, “What’s Wrong With New York?” (out Sept. 6), mentioning the Dare to anyone with an opinion about him is sure to provoke a strong one.

Much like that suit and his previous output — much like its title, even — “What’s Wrong With New York?” is lyrically and musically audacious, big in sound, concept and character. It will be received as (depending on your persuasion) vapid and puerile, or a sincerely fun, joyous, laugh-out-loud, self-aware testament to the power of cheek; as a love letter to being young and hedonistic in New York, or as an overindulged paean to privilege; and as the product of either the latest in a long line of overhyped downtown darlings, or someone in the great tradition of pop pastiche, making music about music.

Or, maybe, all of those things at once.

But as his own lore continues taking shape, the reality is, if not as sexy, certainly compelling. The album is a tight 10-song flex of Smith’s formidable production skills that ranges from winking to baldfaced in its referential debt to early aughts New York City dance rock (LCD Soundsystem, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Fischerspooner). That epoch, itself, was in debt to 1980s post-punk and no-wave (Gang of Four, ESG, Liquid Liquid), all bands whose music once rang out in New York clubs like APT and Lit Lounge, at parties hosted by Todd P and Justine D.

In conversation, Smith traffics seamlessly in a fusillade of musical references: the Fall, Daft Punk, Kompakt Records, Art Brut, Kim Gordon, Verraco, Richard Hell, Sabrina Carpenter and even Third Eye Blind. Responding to questions via email, Charli XCX called him “encyclopedic about music in a way that I am just not at all.”

The Dare’s origin story is the stuff of determined, wide-eyed suburbanite dreams. He grew up outside of Seattle with a psychotherapist mother, and a father (since passed) who was a charismatic salesman of medical equipment. Not particularly musically inclined, they still had Smith learning violin at 4, which he traded in for a guitar at 12. At 16, he taught himself how to play drums. All the while, Smith spent time learning about music by digging through CDs in the library, and searching online.

Attending college outside Portland, he released a steady stream of music as Turtlenecked — occasionally twee, proficiently composed twangy rock — and continued after moving to New York in 2018 while substitute teaching to make ends meet.

In 2020, mid-pandemic, Smith took a more playful approach, and quickly wrote and recorded the song “Girls” in his East Williamsburg bedroom. Over a thrumming synth line with an exploding chorus, he sneered bawdy lyrical provocations — which was exactly the point.

“I just like music that rubs people one way or the other, and I dislike music that plays in the background at a cafe,” Smith said, “and I don’t think my music will ever be doing that.” Still, he added, “I don’t think my music is that provocative, to be honest.”

On that statement, mileage may vary. In the sub-two-minute run time of “Girls,” the Dare proclaims his affections for those who are pregnant, tall, small, homicidal, sadistic, recreational drug users, college educated, indoor smokers, orgasm fakers and who hate the Dare. Released in August 2022, the track took hold in New York, and by the end of the year, the Dare was filling small venues with audiences at fever pitch, bursting onto streaming playlists and critics’ year-end lists.

“Music is a special place where you can break free of these sort of traditional social norms and niceties,” Smith said. “It’s a freeing experience, to sit down and make things that are exciting and larger than life and not, like, beholden to reality all the time.” Indeed, another truth: Smith, unlike the Dare, is soft-spoken, well-mannered, bordering on bashful and prone to bouts of uncut earnestness.

After signing to Republic in May 2023, Smith dropped “The Sex EP,” on which the Dare suggests (among other things) that your mom might want to have sex (with him). The cover, depicting simulated (albeit clothed) sex, yielded outrage across the internet and in the media; it also yielded fawning press coverage, heralding the next big thing.

All that press over so little music could be the setup for either an extraordinary failure or an incredibly auspicious beginning. The experience — particularly the events of the past few weeks — has been “totally insane,” Smith said. “I just had no idea that it would happen at all.”

What happened was this: After hearing “Girls,” Charli XCX reached out over Instagram (“a total surprise”), and Smith produced “Guess,” her sultry thumper culminating in a scuzzy blast of distorted bass synths. In August, a remix featuring Billie Eilish dropped, catapulting the Dare into a new stratosphere of fame, just weeks before his debut album arrives.

His other famous fans include the journeywoman D.J. Avalon Emerson and Dylan Brady, of the avant-garde pop duo 100 gecs, who worked on “Guess” as well as several tracks on Smith’s album. Reached by phone, Brady pointed to “the boldness of the lyrics, and the melodies, and sound sources” of the Dare’s music. Smith, he explained, “seems to have a clear vision of what he’s trying to do, and he’s able to do it.”

Charli XCX agreed: “To write the kind of lyrics he writes, you need to have a certain level of fearlessness combined with humor, knowledge of how to write a song plus how to let go of all the things you’re ‘supposed’ to do to write a song,” she wrote.

“I really believe that Harrison will be one of the next big pop producers,” she continued. “Someone who helps artists find their sound, gives them their most exciting records, that kind of thing.”

“Give him five years. He’ll have had his fingerprints over many big albums.”

Back in Electric Lady, Smith queued up the final song on his album, “You Can Never Go Home.”

“I was thinking it’d be cool to end the album with — instead of putting a bow on it and kind of wrapping up the story — being like: It’s just begun, the prelude to something bigger,” he said, smiling and shrugging, as if to acknowledge the bombast of what he’d just said. “Which is the goal, you know? To do bigger things.”

The track opens with a large, sparse, electric piano line, builds from there, and is as close to anthemic as the Dare gets — a song about going out tonight, living in the present and not looking back. “I was trying to reference this Justice quote, actually,” Smith explained, “where they were talking about how they wanted to make music for when a wrestler enters the arena.”

Ever the showman, he’s saved one of his best tricks for last. If you’re a Dare fan or Dare detester, it’s hard not to crack a smirk — if not an outright smile — at the song’s opening couplet:

“Sometimes I only sing one note,” he croons, stretching out that last word, before continuing onto the next line, “sometimes I steal what others wrote.” When he sings it, he’s stretching out that last word again, though this time, ever so slightly, bending the pitch, changing the note.

“The Falling Star” works best if you watch it with the same eyes through which you’d watch a ballet, albeit a slapsticky one. The story it tells is dark, but the way in which it’s told is lightly comedic, more dependent on images and movement than character and plot. That the film’s directors, Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, both got their start (and met each other) as clowns is no surprise. They star here, too: Gordon as Fiona, a bereaved mother who is also a private eye; and Abel as two characters, an activist-turned-bartender, Boris, and his depressed doppelgänger, Dom, who is also Fiona’s ex-husband.

Boris has been hiding out for 35 years since a bombing attempt gone wrong, pouring pints at the Belgian bar he owns with his wife, Kayoko (Kaori Ito). But when a man with a prosthetic arm shows up and tries to assassinate Boris, Kayoko and Boris hatch a plan with their friend and colleague Tim (Philippe Martz) to swap Dom in for Boris, without telling Dom he is a decoy.

If this sounds like a setup for a lightly Shakespearean comedy of errors, that’s because it is, though it’s other things too. There are mistaken identities, missed connections and misguided romances, interspersed with bits of dancing and music not always strictly motivated by the plot.

In their previous films, Abel and Gordon have worked in the tradition of cinematic burlesque, and here they riff on film noir (though our private eye is a lady, and she is asked to hunt down a lost dog). The noir provides some background tone: a world of anxiety and suspicion, a bit pessimistic and also swoony.

Mostly, though, “The Falling Star” is a comedy with an edge: a story about losing one’s sense of purpose in life and wondering if it will ever return. Yet the film does not lead with its plot, nor are its characters all that memorable. What will stay with you is the mood, and that mood is created by its images.

The camera is often set at an angle to evoke the distance between characters, and thus “The Fallen Star” feels almost like a series of tableaus, scenes painted in rich hues of deep green and bright red and warm gold, dressed sparingly but strikingly. Each frame recalls the fussy, otherworldly precision of Jacques Tati or Wes Anderson; in one scene, two characters unwittingly sit next to one another in bathroom stalls, crying on the same sheet of toilet paper that spools under the wall between them, an image that is clever, a little funny and also terribly sad.

Similarly, there’s an emphasis on movement. The actors gesture and glide and jump and fall with deliberate, sometimes elegant motion. They’re both exaggerated and fluid — clowning is an obvious influence, as is Ito’s background as a dancer — and often feel like a pantomime of how people actually move. In an early scene, Boris thrashes in bed, tortured by old memories; Kayoko sees him, then joins him, the pair lying horizontal while their legs appear to be running from some unseen memory. It’s as if they are puppets playing out the past for us, the observers.

Speaking of us: We are perhaps not as charmed as the movie is charming. “The Falling Star” offers little in the way of dramatic tension or intrigue, and its comedy, mildly clever at first, starts to feel repetitive. The word “tedious” popped into my mind a few times, perhaps because the world of the film is so small that it starts to feel airless and lacking in surprise.

Best to watch for the rich visual imagination on display, rather than wait for any satisfying conclusion. As befits a dark comedy, by the end of “The Falling Star,” everyone — including the audience — is in roughly the same place they started.

The Falling Star
Not rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.