Month: September 2026

artwork - lee cundangan 2

The Smudges Stay: Lee Cundañgan’s Hand-Painted Christmas Cards, Imperfections Included

Look closely inside some of Lee Cundañgan’s Christmas cards and you’ll spot faint smudges, the kind a print shop would wipe away before anything ships. She won’t clean them. “I refuse,” she says. To her, those marks show that a real person painted the card by hand, with paint that didn’t always go where she wanted it to. That stubbornness runs through every card in the five-design sets she’s selling this Christmas. So does a more pressing reason for selling them this year. Four Cards That Weren’t Supposed to Be a Business Cundañgan calls herself an artist, storyteller, and educator, and a “professional raketera,” Filipino slang for someone who juggles several gigs at once. Painting is one of them. Last Christmas, when she was just starting out as a painter, she made four cards for fun and didn’t think much of them. Then the compliments started coming in, a lot of them. Two close friends told her the cards deserved a proper run the following year. This year, she listened. Five Designs, Each One Built …

Dom Camozzi in Calvin Klein

Dominic Camozzi’s Superbods Run Started With His Mother’s Stroke

Dominic Camozzi’s mother was overseas when she had a stroke, and he could only follow the news from a distance. “I was shocked, and being that far away made me feel completely helpless,” he tells ElysPlanet. Camozzi had spent years training his own body with real discipline. The stroke made him think about who else he should have been training for. “I hadn’t put that same energy into my family’s health,” he says. He decided to do whatever it took to help her recover, and to help her build habits that would lower her chances of another stroke. That decision shaped his run at Century Tuna Superbods 2026, the Philippines’ longest-running fitness search, now in its 20th year. The 35-year-old from Taguig made the men’s Top 8, and by the time our pre-finals rundown of the men’s field introduced him, his mother’s health was already the center of his story. A Park, a Dog, and a Set of Resistance Bands The first sessions were walks. Camozzi and his mother would take the family dog to …