MUSE.TV
Daily
30-second culture drops — fresh news with fast context.
MUSE Daily is your pulse on what’s happening now across Art, Music, Film, Life, and Performance. We take the biggest releases, premieres, announcements, and scene shifts and turn them into quick, watchable updates in the MUSE voice. New drops land throughout the week, so you’re always in sync with what’s moving culture today.
MUSE.TV Daily — Film
Sean Baker to Debut New Short Film Sandiwara with Michelle Yeoh Through self-portrait Residency
Indie auteur and Academy Award winner Sean Baker is bringing his filmmaking into fashion-film territory with Sandiwara, a new short starring Michelle Yeoh and created as part of self-portrait’s Residency program in Penang, Malaysia.
Baker wrote, shot, and edited the film himself — a fully hands-on approach that tracks with a career built on independence and sharp human storytelling. Sandiwara stars Malaysian-born, Academy Award–winning actress Michelle Yeoh and is set to premiere in February 2026.
The project was produced through self-portrait’s Residency initiative, a cross-disciplinary program that invites independent creatives across art, fashion, architecture, entertainment, and culture to experiment and build work in a limited-time collaborative setting. For this chapter, Baker and his team immersed themselves in Penang, drawing from the textures, rituals, and everyday moments of Malay culture.
Baker describes Sandiwara as an extension of his love for independent cinema, made possible through the creative freedom of the Residency and the team behind it. self-portrait founder and creative director Han Chong calls the collaboration a natural match, pointing to Baker’s self-reliant filmmaking spirit and the Residency’s mission to support risk-taking, authentic creative dialogue, and cultural exchange.
More details about Sandiwara are expected ahead of its February 2026 release.
Why MUSE is watching: Baker’s move into a fashion residency signals a widening lane for short-form cinema — where fashion houses aren’t just funding projects, they’re helping shape them. With Yeoh at the center and Penang as the setting, Sandiwara looks positioned to spotlight Malaysian culture through a global, independent lens.
Release window: February 2026
Categories: Film • Life • Performance
Source: self-portrait
MUSE
Interviews
Kindred creators in motion.
Cinematic multimedia interviews with artists, musicians, makers, and creative thinkers — revealed through atmosphere, image, and quiet attention.
ELLY CHO - Interview
Award-Winning Visual Artist & Filmmaker
Exploring the intersection of
nature, environment, and human behavior
across painting, film, and performance.
“The porous rock, shifting wind patterns, and seasonal changes — alongside the stark contrast between urban Seoul and Jeju’s elemental nature — left a strong imprint on how I understand memory.”
1. What early landscape or memory first shaped your way of seeing — and how does it continue to shape your ecological approach today?
I grew up moving between Seoul and various natural landscapes, but I was especially affected by the raw materiality of Jeju Island’s volcanic terrain. The porous rock, shifting wind patterns, and seasonal changes — alongside the stark contrast between urban Seoul and Jeju’s elemental nature — left a strong imprint on how I understand memory. For me, memory is not something stored, but something held in the body and land, expressed through material, movement, and visual narrative.
That early experience taught me to listen through texture, silence, and repetition — a way of seeing that continues to guide how I approach ecological fieldwork today.
“What’s most alive for me now is the possibility of working across these worlds — human, nonhuman, and algorithmic — to explore how memory, sensation, and intelligence might be reimagined together.”
2. Your work spans desert systems, coastal environments, pigment processes, and AI-generated imagery. What draws these worlds together for you?
I’m drawn to materials that carry memory — pigment, salt, breath — elements that feel alive and responsive. These landscapes, whether desert or coastal, feel like thresholds: they echo the body’s own cycles of erosion, rhythm, and transformation. I often approach these places as sensorial collaborators — spaces that move and hold memory in ways that go beyond language.
My previous film Climate Hybrids explored speculative ecosystems shaped by water, migration, and adaptation. That project deepened my interest in ecological storytelling through movement, mythology, and evolving species. In Desert Futures, I continue this thread by shifting focus to the desert — not as barren, but as a site of reimagination, where ecological time, human gesture, and machine perception begin to entangle.
Rather than separating technology and nature, I’m interested in how they might reflect each other. AI in my work doesn’t aim to simulate nature, but to echo it — to listen, respond, and perhaps absorb its rhythms. These connections are still evolving. What’s most alive for me now is the possibility of working across these worlds — human, nonhuman, and algorithmic — to explore how memory, sensation, and intelligence might be reimagined together.
“The choreography was born from both emotional memory and environmental tension — particularly the internal contradictions of being between fantasy and reality.”
3. How do you experience the relationship between ecological research and personal memory when you’re creating?
For me, ecological research is not just external — it becomes deeply embodied and personal. When I begin a project, I don’t separate scientific exploration from lived experience. I enter the landscape through touch, movement, and observation. The way pigment shifts in salt air, or how breath echoes in a cavernous space — these sensory cues often unlock memory.
In my work, personal memory doesn’t stay in the background — it becomes material. A gesture from childhood, a visual from a recurring dream, or the shape of breath under water might resurface and form the seed of a scene. In my silent film sum(Island), I explored themes of isolation and self-discovery through movement, drawing from my experiences living on islands like Jeju, Manhattan, and London. The choreography was born from both emotional memory and environmental tension — particularly the internal contradictions of being between fantasy and reality.
This process continued in Climate Hybrids, where I used AI and choreography to reimagine evolutionary futures. Though rooted in scientific dialogue about adaptation and climate change, the film was shaped by my bodily memory and cultural imagination. The dancers’ movements embodied hybrid species, but also mirrored psychological states, ancestral echoes, and speculative longing.
So for me, ecological research and memory co-create one another. Memory brings intimacy to data, and research lends form to memory. Together, they shape how I build visual worlds — fragmented, rhythmic, and responsive to the emotional life of both land and body.
“It’s not about simulating nature, but creating dialogues between material intelligence and digital perception — a space where pigments and code both carry memory.”
Artist Diletta Innoceni Fagni
Creative Perspective
Diletta Innoceni Fagni
Artist, Painter, Professional Dreamer
Describe the vibe in your studio?
I don't have a set time to begin, it's inspiration that guides me. Sometimes it can be early in the morning, with the soft, warm light entering my studio windows, dimly illuminating the canvas, other times it happens that I spend the night painting, unable to tear myself away from my work. It's something very intimate and personal, just me and my creation, like a moment of love, accompanied by harmonious light, relaxing music, often classical music.
“I believe that for an artist to have a full and rich soul is their prerogative and a necessity.”
How does living between Rome & Tuscany enrich your work & life?
I was born in Florence, and I have breathed art since I was a child. By moving to Rome I broadened my sense of art even more. Two cities of art par excellence. I often go back to Tuscany, I relax, I try to absorb all the art and culture that surrounds me. Living between Rome and Tuscany lls my soul. And I believe that for an artist to have a full and rich soul is his prerogative and a necessity.
Favorite moments from past exhibitions?
I made my rst exhibition in Florence, and I was so happy to see all my greatest loved ones present. And this is de nitely the best moment of an exhibition. Then of course, that my works are also appreciated.
“I love to use soft, warm and sensual brushstrokes for celebrating femininity of women and the union between nature and the human being in a romantic, delicate and contemporary vision.”
What is your creative process?
Mywork draws on mnemonic images and visual resources as starting points, looking for intimacy, emotions and identity, between present and past, real and unreal. I mostly paint scenes of private moments, seeking the evocative power of images. I love to use soft, warm and sensual brushstrokes for celebrating femininity of women and the union between nature and the human being in a romantic, delicate and contemporary vision.
“It is love, passion, the desire to tell, to tell oneself, to feel free.”
What does a creative perspective mean to you? What is the best thing about being an artist?
For me, being an artist means having a vision and sensitivity towards what one sees, feel and perceives. A need and a desire to express themselves. Something irrational that is difficult to explain. I think it's the art, the artwork itself that can best describe it. It is love, passion, the desire to tell, to tell oneself, to feel free.
The Studio Shop
Holiday Gift Curation
