As traditional resting spaces vanish across South East Asia, a lucrative and controversial new market is emerging: grief tech. Driven by rapidly ageing populations, a surge in lonely deaths, and a severe shortage of burial space, societies across Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are dismantling rigid ancestral traditions to redesign the end of life.

Pioneers blur the boundaries between memory and reality to grant families a final conversation with their late loved ones, through avatars, virtual reality and holograms. But is this technology providing a therapeutic soft landing for trauma, or merely trapping the bereaved in a digital delusion?

Meanwhile social innovations around death are meant to improve reality for the living: expensive funeral rites are being stripped away, while 'living funerals' allow participants to lie in mock coffins, giving them a renewed lust for life. But how life-affirming is it really to fixate upon death? And is dying alone a fate to be accepted, or have social and romantic lives become more fragmented than ever before?