Latest news with #Mariya
Asia News Network
11-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Asia News Network
Cambodian culinary talent shines in international Michelin kitchens
July 11, 2025 PHNOM PENH – Chef Mariya Un Noun, a rising star from Cambodia, is fast gaining a reputation in Michelin-starred kitchens across Europe and Southeast Asia. Her high-flying kitchen adventures not only highlight the rich flavours of Khmer cuisine but also raise the profile of Cambodian cooking on the global stage. 'I am determined that Cambodian flavours be recognised worldwide and become a well-earned boost to our tourism industry,' said Mariya. 'My journey, which has taken me to some of the best kitchens in Europe, shows that every one of us can play a role in helping to promote our nation,' she added. Mariya's story is one of overcoming adversity. Growing up in Cambodia, she faced limited opportunities, especially as a young woman in one of the world's least-developed nations. Like many of her peers, she questioned what the future held — whether it would be marriage, motherhood, or working in low-paying domestic jobs. However, her life took a turning point when Hannes Schmid, a Swiss international artist and philanthropist, took her under his wing. He introduced her to the Smiling Gecko Cambodia charity, an organisation that offers education and job opportunities to disadvantaged youth. Founded in 2012 by Hannes Schmid and Ngon Sokleap, Smiling Gecko Cambodia is a charity dedicated to alleviating poverty through education and sustainable development. The organisation established a self-sustaining community at its Farmhouse Resort, located 60 kilometres north of Phnom Penh. With a natural talent for cooking, Mariya's skills were soon recognised by Schmid, who arranged for her to pursue further training in Switzerland. 'After we took her into the Smiling Gecko charity's Farmhouse and started training her in the kitchen, we discovered she had a real talent,' said Schmid. There, she had the opportunity to work alongside top Michelin-star chefs, including Franck Giovannini and Andreas Caminada. She has also hosted 'culinary journeys' in top restaurants in Singapore and Bangkok. Now, she is not only promoting Khmer cuisine globally but also contributing to the Smiling Gecko Cambodia's mission at its Farmhouse Luxury Resort & Spa, where she runs a fine-dining restaurant and a chef's table. Mariya's achievements are also a source of pride for Smiling Gecko co-founder Sokleap. 'Mariya's success is a testament to what we stand for. Our goal is to help underprivileged individuals gain the skills they need to build a sustainable future,' said Sokleap. Mariya's remarkable journey has caught the attention of several high-profile brands, including Mercedes-Benz, V-Zug, Victorinox and luxury watchmaker Bucherer/Rolex, who have supported her endeavours through commercial endorsements. From humble beginnings to international acclaim, Mariya's story highlights the potential of Cambodian talent, not just in the culinary world, but in the broader global arena as well. In addition to the resort, Smiling Gecko includes a school, medical facilities, animal husbandry training and a solar power plant. The organisation's mission is to empower Cambodians to break free from poverty by providing them with the tools to help themselves.
Los Angeles Times
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
They want to be your anime best friend — on your phone and IRL at Dodger Stadium
Kou Mariya hasn't shown her work to her family. That's because Mariya, not her real name, is living a dual identity, and to protect her privacy, only the most sacred of confidants — or business partners — can know her true persona. Mariya, to her more than 84,000 followers on YouTube, is a friendly, flirtatious vampire singer, as excited to chat about her digitized outfits and accessories as she is to sing a late '90s pop song. She performs as an animated avatar using motion capture technology, which matches her facial expressions and body movements to the drawn figure. Mariya spends a significant portion of her days as this cartoon character, at once wholly real while being completely artificial. She is a professional performer, although her stage is virtual. Instead of a glimpse into a room or a home, her surroundings are fully drawn — she could be in a beach setting one day and an ornate office the next. As a VTuber — that is, virtual YouTuber — Mariya is part of a movement, one led by those weaned on Japanese animation who are now finding ways to make fantasy world-building feel individualized and personal. We connect via video conferencing software, her location in the U.S. a secret, and Mariya appears in her anime form, her silver-white hair occasionally obscuring her welcoming oval eyes, which blink often as she speaks. Her voice is friendly and warm, and it ever-so-slightly dips into an upper register when she laughs or needs to emphasize a point. She nervously chuckles that she'll be aged 'so bad' when she admits the first anime she fell in love with was 'Speed Racer.' Whether I'm talking to Mariya the vampire character or Mariya the performer is never quite clear. This weekend Mariya will be hosting a concert in Hollywood with other popular VTubers. There will be live musicians, but the VTubers will be virtual. Mariya says she'll be performing from an off-site location to protect her identity. Those in Los Angeles will have multiple opportunities to take part in a VTuber crash course over the Fourth of July holiday. Mariya on Thursday will host the Fantastic Reality concert at the Vermont Hollywood, a performance that makes virtual and real musicians and features Ironmouse, a horned, operatic demon who was briefly the most subscribed streamer on Twitch. Even more mainstream, a host of VTubers associated with Japanese firm Hololive will invade Dodger Stadium for the second year in a row. Saturday evening's Hololive Night will feature three of company's English-speaking talents — Ninomae Ina'nis, IRyS and Koseki Bijou — virtually cheering on the team, singing the seventh-inning stretch and then leading a post-game dance party on the field. A special event ticket will include playing cards of the VTubers. Hololive, a division of Cover Corp., is one of the largest VTuber talent agencies in the world, with almost 90 active performers across its various divisions. The company's U.S. office is based in L.A., and its partnership with the Dodgers is to recognize, in part, that the team has a large Japanese fanbase, thanks to megastar Shohei Ohtani. Cover CEO Motoaki Tanigo, however, has a broader goal, and that's to further bring VTubers to the masses. 'There are two reasons,' Tanigo says, via a translator, for why Cover has targeted L.A. as one of its key markets. The first, he notes, is due to the fact that a large part of the company's fanbase resides in the L.A. region. The second, he stresses, relates to his business goals, especially the video game firms Cover hopes to partner with. 'Doing events in the Los Angeles area is not only important for our user engagement, but it's a great opportunity to show to our business clients that we have a strong following.' VTubers have averaged 50 billion YouTube views annually over the past three years, according to a recent YouTube Culture & Trends report. A YouTube sample of 300 virtual creators found that they drove 15 billion views across the site, with 1 billion coming from the U.S. alone. Almost all of these VTubers are steeped deeply in anime lore, culture and tone. And while there are popular male VTubers, a number of the most famous are female-facing. Cover's roster, for instance, is more than three-quarters female. 'It's very exciting,' says Susan Napier, author of 'Miyazakiworld: A Life in Art' and professor at Tufts University who specializes in Japanese culture. 'It allows for an enormous amount of creativity, and a real sense of ownership over your creation, and a way of playing and melding with your creation. People have been fans and identifying with favorite stories, anime and manga for years. This is, in a way, a very old phenomena. It's people wanting to participate in a fantasy world that they love.' Mariya notes she decided to become a VTuber during the worst days of the global pandemic of 2020. 'Everyone was in front of their computers and had a sense of loneliness,' she says. 'And VTubers [had] that sense of, 'I'm not alone. I'm not trapped. There's a whole world out there for me.' Being a big fan of that, I wanted to try that myself. I did not expect to be able to make this into a career, but somehow people liked me, and I thought I could keep going with this.' And how, of course, did she land on her character, a vampire with a bat clip in her hair and an open-chested cocktail server-style outfit? 'That one is tricky because technically I was born a vampire,' Mariya says. 'We're not scary. We ask permission before entering doors, which is better than a lot of people. We do bite. That's the only downside.' Right. The Japan-led VTtuber trend predates the pandemic. The first proper virtual artist to gain fame is widely credited as Kizuna AI in 2016, but VTubers have grown alongside other similar developments. See, for instance, virtual concert artist Hatsune Miku, who performed at Coachella in 2024. VTubers are also closely aligned with video games, often streaming them for their fans. The game medium, of course, has long been associated with virtual avatars, be it Nintendo Mii figures, the personas of 'Second Life' or today's platforms of 'Fortnite,' 'Roblox' and 'Minecraft.' And this summer, in one of the biggest releases of 2025, VTuber Usada Pekora has a role in the PlayStation 5 game 'Death Stranding 2,' with famed director and auteur Hideo Kojima admitting he is a fan. For creator, voice-over actor and Anime Expo attendee AmaLee, the rare VTuber who, while using a stage name, does show her face, anime's fantastical yet mature storylines reached her as a young teen when she was exploring her creativity. 'It's bridging a gap,' she says of VTubing. 'Ever since I was a teenager I loved anime. It's music, beautiful animation and acting all in one. VTubing brings it into the real world. You can do so much with your VTuber lore story. You're kind of creating your own anime.' The most appealing VTubers bring a level of real-life authenticity into their work. 'If you go back and watch my very first streams, I'm very cemented in this cleanly elegant actor [persona],' AmaLee says. 'My voice is different. I dropped it to be cooler. I realized quickly how hard that was to keep, and I didn't like not being authentically me. I'm a little clumsy, a little blond and I have major tech issues.' Mariya describes herself as introvert, saying she wouldn't be streaming — or likely even performing — if it weren't for VTubing. 'With VTubing, there's a sense of anonymity that I think is really good for the audience as well,' Mariya says. 'Some people don't want to see a physical person in front of a screen. They want to see anime girls. I think people latch onto the idea that it's something that is different and bigger than me and bigger than them. It's a new world.' Author and professor Napier says it's a modern, digitized Renaissance faire, if you will, reflecting basic human desires to dress up and play. As for why it just so happens to be so connected to anime, Napier theorizes the medium fosters the idea of fantasy creation. 'Fantasy and science fiction are very popular culture artistic venues to play and to cosplay,' Napier says. 'Anime is really good at presenting you with these — it's brilliantly expansive. Whatever you're into, you'll find it in anime. So if you're looking to VTube, there's all this anime material sitting in front of you. You can pick and choose and start playing.' The dream for the Cover corporation, says Tanigo, is to expand VTubers beyond the world of streaming sites such as YouTube and Twitch — hence, the Dodgers collaboration. In August, Hololive will stage another U.S. concert, this time at Radio City Musical Hall in New York. Music, says Tanigo, is a gateway. 'I believe that's a way of reaching new people,' he says. 'It's an interesting thing to go see. There are also people who may not be interested in VTubing or anime at all, but they can listen to the song that's released and enjoy it as a piece of music on its own.' For the performers, with VTubing comes a sense of safety — and even comfort — that isn't always present in more traditional streaming. 'I did a lot of on-camera streaming in the beginning of my streaming career, but I hated having to get ready, do my makeup, wear something nice,' AmaLee says. 'Even after an hour of getting ready to do a stream, someone was still [commenting], 'You look tired today.' I hated that. There would be days I would cancel streams because I didn't want to get ready. Now I have my VTuber model and can be a little gremlin in my pajamas and no one has to know because Monarch is always perfect.' An anime character, after all, is always ready to go.
Time of India
20-05-2025
- Politics
- Time of India
Indian Army organises free medical camp to support civilians affected in shelling during Indo Pak conflict
Baramulla : In a humanitarian effort to support the civilians affected by Pakistshelling during the Indo-Pak conflict , Indian army on Tuesday organised a free medical camp in the Uri sector of Baramulla. Meanwhile, havoc has wreaked the life of locals in the Rajouri district who were the first to be in the line of fire during the Indo-Pak conflict. The homes of these locals have been destroyed or are in a dilapidated condition, becoming uninhabitable. Mohammad, an elder of a village in Rajouri, said that his entire house came down after shells hit the building. He appealed to the government to provide his family with tents and other assistance since they have nowhere to go. "It was morning when I was going for my prayers, and we heard the explosion. We have a house with two floors, which came down. It has become uninhabitable. We should be given tents or some kind of assistance. They (officials) came, saw and went away. I was admitted to the hospital (after injuries to the head) and recieved stitches. I have been discharged after seven days," he said. "I took loans to teach my have no support. I urge the government to help us in any way possible," he added. Mariya, a family member, said that her uncle Mohammad and her cousins were inside the house when shelling occurred, after which they fainted and regained consciousness after a while. "When shelling occurred, my uncle (Mohammad) and his family members were inside the house. The shelling has caused massive losses to them. They have worked as labour to educate their daughters. Everyone in the house fainted when the shells hit the house. As soon as they regained consciousness, they tended to my uncle's injuries. We appeal to the government to help them," she said. Saima, daughter of Mohammad, said that her father educated them by indulging in labour and built the house by taking loans. She lamented that many household items kept for her newly wedded sister were also destroyed due to the shelling. Intense shelling by Pakistan during the recent conflict with India has left a trail of destruction in the border villages and districts across the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir, with locals suffering damages to their houses and livelihood. Reportedly, the locals have suffered damages to their livestock, properties, and essentially their livelihood in border areas such as Nowshera. Over a week ago, the locals residing in the border villages demanded that the government compensate them for the damaged houses. They also urge the Indian government "not to spare Pakistan" for its misadventures.
India Gazette
20-05-2025
- Politics
- India Gazette
Indian Army organises free medical camp to support civilians affected in shelling during Indo Pak conflict
Baramulla (Jammu and Kashmir) [India], May 20 (ANI): In a humanitarian effort to support the civilians affected by Pakistani shelling during the Indo-Pak conflict, Indian army on Tuesday organised a free medical camp in the Uri sector of Baramulla. Meanwhile, havoc has wreaked the life of locals in the Rajouri district who were the first to be in the line of fire during the Indo-Pak conflict. The homes of these locals have been destroyed or are in a dilapidated condition, becoming uninhabitable. Mohammad, an elder of a village in Rajouri, said that his entire house came down after shells hit the building. He appealed to the government to provide his family with tents and other assistance since they have nowhere to go. 'It was morning when I was going for my prayers, and we heard the explosion. We have a house with two floors, which came down. It has become uninhabitable. We should be given tents or some kind of assistance. They (officials) came, saw and went away. I was admitted to the hospital (after injuries to the head) and recieved stitches. I have been discharged after seven days,' he said. 'I took loans to teach my have no support. I urge the government to help us in any way possible,' he added. Mariya, a family member, said that her uncle Mohammad and her cousins were inside the house when shelling occurred, after which they fainted and regained consciousness after a while. 'When shelling occurred, my uncle (Mohammad) and his family members were inside the house. The shelling has caused massive losses to them. They have worked as labour to educate their daughters. Everyone in the house fainted when the shells hit the house. As soon as they regained consciousness, they tended to my uncle's injuries. We appeal to the government to help them,' she said. Saima, daughter of Mohammad, said that her father educated them by indulging in labour and built the house by taking loans. She lamented that many household items kept for her newly wedded sister were also destroyed due to the shelling. Intense shelling by Pakistan during the recent conflict with India has left a trail of destruction in the border villages and districts across the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir, with locals suffering damages to their houses and livelihood. Reportedly, the locals have suffered damages to their livestock, properties, and essentially their livelihood in border areas such as Nowshera. Over a week ago, the locals residing in the border villages demanded that the government compensate them for the damaged houses. They also urge the Indian government 'not to spare Pakistan' for its misadventures. (ANI)
India Gazette
20-05-2025
- Politics
- India Gazette
J-K: Houses damaged in shelling during Indo-Pak conflict, families seeks assistance
Rajouri (Jammu and Kashmir) [India], May 20 (ANI): Locals in the Rajouri district of Jammu and Kashmir were the first to be in the line of fire during the recent conflict between India and Pakistan, which has come to a pause after both countries reached an agreement of cessation of hostilities. However, the destruction caused by shelling from the Pakistani side has wreaked havoc in the lives of people living in villages near the border areas, with their houses destroyed or in a dilapidated condition, becoming uninhabitable. Mohammad, an elder of a village in Rajouri, said that his entire house came down after shells hit the building. He appealed to the government to provide his family with tents and other assistance since they have nowhere to go. 'It was morning when I was going for my prayers, and we heard the explosion. We have a house with two floors, which came down. It has become uninhabitable. We should be given tents or some kind of assistance. They (officials) came, saw and went away. I was admitted to the hospital (after injuries to the head) and recieved stitches. I have been discharged after seven days,' he said. 'I took loans to teach my have no support. I urge the government to help us in any way possible,' he added. Mariya, a family member, said that her uncle Mohammad and her cousins were inside the house when shelling occurred, after which they fainted and regained consciousness after a while. 'When shelling occurred, my uncle (Mohammad) and his family members were inside the house. The shelling has caused massive losses to them. They have worked as labour to educate their daughters. Everyone in the house fainted when the shells hit the house. As soon as they regained consciousness, they tended to my uncle's injuries. We appeal to the government to help them,' she said. Saima, daughter of Mohammad, said that her father educated them by indulging in labour and built the house by taking loans. She lamented that many household items kept for her newly wedded sister were also destroyed due to the shelling. 'We are three sisters. Our father has taught us by doing labour with huge difficulties. We built this house by taking loans. Our sister just got married, and many items that were kept for her have been destroyed. We were in the kitchen; my father was in the lobby when the shelling occurred,' she added. Akhtar, wife of Mohammad, became emotional while describing the scenes from when their house was destroyed. 'I feel like running away. I never want to return here,' she said. 'The shelling happened around 5:00 in the morning. I was trapped in the washroom. One of my daughters rescued me after regaining consciousness. Everything is destroyed. Nobody is there to earn. My husband got a head injury, which has left him incapable of working. We have no support,' she added. Intense shelling by Pakistan during the recent conflict with India has left a trail of destruction in the border villages and districts across the Line of Control (LoC) in Jammu and Kashmir, with locals suffering damages to their houses and livelihood. Reportedly, the locals have suffered damages to their livestock, properties, and essentially their livelihood in border areas such as Nowshera. Last week, Jammu and Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister Surinder Choudhary visited border villages near the LoC in Rajouri district and interacted with residents affected by recent hostilities. Over a week ago, the locals residing in the border villages demanded that the government compensate them for the damaged houses. They also urge the Indian government 'not to spare Pakistan' for its misadventures. Vijay Kumar, a local from a village in Nowshera, said that his entire life savings were spent on building the house, which has been damaged due to shelling by Pakistan. He said that the government must compensate those who have suffered damages to their houses in the village, inflicted due to the shelling. (ANI)
