What we mean when we say “sustainable”: Notes on Share Meeting 3

Reflection after Share Meeting 3: The Art Born From Earthquakes, Thunder, Fires, Fathers, and Pathogens · PENANG, MARCH 2026

Nguyễn Tú Hằng

How we arrived

In September 2025, I was invited to the Taiwan Art Space Alliance Annual Meeting in Taipei. It was there that I first met Takuya Tsutsumi, co-director of Yamanaka Suplex, a share studio based in Shiga, Japan. A few months later, in December, AiRViNe (I and artist Trần Thảo Miên) conducted a residency research across Japan, and we visited Yamanaka Suplex directly. Takuya and we had more time then to talk about what the space was actually doing — and about a meeting he was co-organizing with Blank Canvas in Penang the following March.

That is how AiRViNe came to be invited as an observer to Share-Meeting 3. We were there not to present but to listen — to be in the room where independent spaces, artist-run initiatives, and artistic collectives from across East, Southeast, and South Asia gathered to share the operational realities that usually stay invisible: how you structure a collective, how you keep the money working, what you do when everything depends on two people, and what happens when it becomes time to stop.

I expected to recognize many of the difficulties. What I did not fully expect was how the gathering would clarify something I had been circling for a long time: that sustainability, the word we use constantly in our field, is not one concept but several — and that the gap between them is not simply a matter of resources.

Takuya Tsutsumi and Ikeda Kaho – Directors of Yamanaka Suplex is introducing Share Meeting and their practices. Photo by Thum Chia Chieh.

The problem with the word

When the research team at AiRViNe began mapping residency practices across Japan and Southeast Asia, one of the first things we noticed was that the same word meant entirely different things depending on where you were standing. In Japan, sustainability tends to conjure a ten- or twenty-year arc — an inheritance imagined for the next generation, an institution in the making. In Southeast Asia, for many practitioners, sustainability is measured in months. Whether you will still be able to pay rent until December. Whether there is a next year at all.

This gap is not only financial. It reflects a divergence in what we believe a space is fundamentally for. If a space is conceived as a monument, it must endure. If it is conceived as a practice — an ongoing, responsive act of thinking and making together — it only needs to continue. The forms it takes, the timelines it inhabits, those can change.

Sustainability may not be about how long we keep a space running. It may be about how faithfully we keep the practice alive — in whatever form, at whatever scale, for however long.

Sound artist Madoka Kouno and media artist Shinkan Tamaki presenting their Center / Alternative Space & Hostel in Kanuma, Tochigi, Japan. Coordinated by Alfred Cheong, Blank Canvas in Penang, Malaysia. Photo by Thum Chia Chieh.

On bodies of work that outlast their spaces

Consider DRC No. 12, the independent art space established in 2015 inside a former diplomatic compound on Jianguomenwai Avenue in Beijing — a place with a peculiar extraterritorial quality, where underground cultural activity first flourished in the 1970s and 80s. For a decade, DRC No. 12 ran an invitation-based exhibition program without appointing curators: once a proposal was approved, the artist received a fee and full authority over the project. For each show, a booklet was produced — content and design developed by the artist, printed at the space’s expense. In 2025, Wang Yin’s project Fragrance became the last exhibition at the original site. The space, as a physical address, ended.

But DRC No. 12 did not simply stop. After losing the space, the team began an ongoing screening series, inviting artists to show work and enter into conversation. The Changbai Mountain Artist Residency, co-initiated by DRC No. 12, continued in 2025. The archive of booklets, each one artist-designed and artist-authored, persists. What closed was an address. What continued was a practice and a network.

Zit-Dim Art Space in Tainan offers another version of this question, and a particularly honest one. Now entering its tenth year, Zit-Dim has articulated its own relationship to continuation through the metaphor of a crossfade — the audio technique where one track fades out as another rises, both briefly present at once, and maybe, a state of remix in the future. Peng Yi-Hsuan – co-founder of Zit-Dim posed the question directly: do we still need alternative spaces in this era? The answer Zit-Dim has been living out is not a declaration but a practice of ongoing reconfiguration — building a membership system, developing cross-regional collaborations with spaces in Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Venice, and naming what was once unnamed: that government subsidy, when it becomes structural dependency, functions like a drug. The space at present has three distinct faces — a gallery, a studio, and a lab — sustained partly through the commercial logic of Tu Xing Studio, its ceramics practice, which creates functional vessels, sells through market stalls and department store counters, and uses that income to fund the experimental work the market cannot support. Not a compromise, but a designed ecosystem.

This is what KUNCI Study Forum and Collective in Yogyakarta has understood across more than two decades. Born in the ferment after the fall of Suharto’s regime in 1998 — when the democratization of thinking, ideas, and knowledge was suddenly imaginable — KUNCI started as a cultural studies study group and has kept transforming since: newsletter, library, research, publishing, press, school. Its structure as presented at Share-Meeting was described through a hand-drawn illustration showing three figures — Collective, School of Improper Education, Forum — as a single organism sustained by what KUNCI calls soft infrastructure: agency, affect, shared responsibility, tension, confusion, leadership, intimacy, care. Not a bureaucratic chart but an honest account of what holds a practice together. And its final slide closed with a question directed at everyone in the room: why dream alone, when we’re all dreaming the same thing?

Ending session with perspective from AiRViNe as observers. From left to right: Ali Alasri (ReformARTsi), Alfred Cheong (Blank Canvas), Kenichi Ishiguro (Yamanaka Suplex), Takuya Tsutsumi (Yamanaka Suplex), Nguyễn Tú Hằng (AiRViNe), Trần Thảo Miên (AiRViNe), Ikeda Kaho (Yamanaka Suplex). Photo by Thum Chia Chieh.

Who does the work, and on what time

But a practice is not sustained by ideas alone. It is sustained by people who show up — and at what cost to themselves. Several participants at Share-Meeting 3 mentioned that members of their collectives hold day jobs while doing the artistic work on the side. This is the practical reality for most independent spaces. The question it raises is deceptively simple: when, exactly, does the art happen? Is it a night job, compressed into exhausted hours after the work that pays? Or is it a dream job — the horizon you are orienting toward, the life you are saving up to inhabit?

Center in Kanuma, Tochigi — the space run by sound artist Madoka Kouno and media artist Shinkan Tamaki — is a direct answer to this question, arrived at by decision rather than default. Before founding Center in 2022, both had spent over fifteen years as company employees in Tokyo, continuing their artistic practices around the edges of their work lives. The founding of Center meant quitting those jobs, leaving the city with two kids, and building the conditions for a different kind of life in the place where Shinkan grew up: a small post-town of 90,000 people, ninety minutes from Tokyo, with shuttered shops along the main street and woodworking traditions and a 400-year-old autumn festival. The problems are openly named — how to generate continuous income, how to manage a space that depends entirely on two people, how to build an audience where almost no one is familiar with experimental film, moving image and sound. But the experiment is deliberate: this is what it looks like to choose the practice as the center of the life, rather than a supplement to it.

Think School, the one-year learning program in Sapporo run by an area management company since 2016, represents a different structural answer. Ikuko Imamura is the only art specialist in the company; she built the school in collaboration with an external art organization and embedded it within a commercial operation. The program brings together two cohorts who would never normally meet: professionals in their twenties to forties — CEOs, company employees — learning project planning and art management alongside emerging artists in their teens and thirties focused on contemporary practice. The school is funded by commercial revenue from the public plazas the company manages. Think School has now graduated over 200 students. The alumni have established a shared studio housing 16 artists, a small art festival now in its sixth year, and another shared studio founded by nine emerging artists. It has become a growing ecosystem. The workforce for the art scene in Sapporo did not exist in sufficient numbers; so they built the conditions to generate it.

If there are few places to learn, you can build one in your own city. And if you build it well enough, it builds the next generation of the field.

Yellow Pen Club in Seoul represents a third version of this question — perhaps the most quietly radical. Three curators who met in school in 2015 began writing together under the name Yellow Pen Club, launched a website, and ran art writing workshops. In 2022 they opened YPC SPACE, a program and gallery space on the 3rd floor of an old building in Seoul. What they do there is described simply: mutual learning and collective practices; flexibly negotiating the program and exhibition dyad; navigating institutional frameworks to shape what independent means. Their programs range from a Cuteness Studies Group reading kawaii theory, to seminars on financial capitalism and the neoliberal subject, to iterative art writing workshops. The gallery has shown work that does not fit institutional frameworks or the art market — their stated purpose. Writing is not something they do around their practice. Writing is the practice, the critical instrument, and the organizational method all at once. The daydream job, lived quietly and with considerable rigor.

Yellow Pen Club presenting their practices in Seoul, South Korea. Photo by Thum Chia Chieh.

What we leave behind, and how to leave well

Alice Sarmiento’s Spare Bedroom in Manila offers something different again — quieter, more provisional, and in its own way just as instructive. In June 2025, she accompanied friends to view a house they planned to turn into a café. The house was too large, and the rent was affordable enough to make an experiment possible. She signed a lease with no installation team, no staff in the conventional sense. Her carpenter was Michael, who also does her home maintenance. Her friend Josel manages the space during the day and does stand-up comedy by night. Spare Bedroom was designed from the beginning as a one-year project, not a permanent institution — a deliberate attempt to understand art practice as a means to divest from the capitalist hustle of the art world. Production costs were negotiated with each artist based on their capacity. Sales were not conducted through the space. A bulletin board from one exhibition became a screen in the next, and a shelf for shadow puppets in the one after that. A zine closed each project. What Spare Bedroom demonstrates is that the question of sustainability is inseparable from the question of what you actually need — and that the answer, when examined honestly, is often less than assumed.

Maria Uthe introduces KUNCI Study Forum and Collective in Yogyakarta. Photo by Thum Chia Chieh.

One of Share-Meeting’s stated purposes is to remember independent and non-institutional practices — to recognize activities that may otherwise disappear, which, unlike institutions, cannot document themselves. This is a real problem. Most alternative spaces close without announcement. Instagram goes quiet. The link returns a 404. The memory of what happened there dissolves into the people who were present and disperses as they move on.

DRC No. 12’s response is a booklet for every exhibition, artist-designed and printed at the space’s expense. Spare Bedroom produces a zine for every show. KUNCI has published continuously for two decades, from early newsletters to SSD Uji Coba 1 (2019) to Tools for Radical Study: A Collection of Manuals (MARCH Journal, 2024) to contributions to The AI Anarchies Book (Akademie der Kunste Berlin, 2024). Zit-Dim has been building its cross-regional network precisely so that its accumulated knowledge lives beyond any single address. YPC’s website carries years of art writing, workshop documentation, and critical programs, accumulating a public record of what it means to think seriously about art from outside the institution.

So when the time comes to close — and it will, for all of us — the question is not only whether to close but whether we can do it with enough intention to make the closing itself an act of transmission. An announcement that names what was done and why it mattered. A list of contacts. A set of documents someone else can find and trace back to something real. The ending of a space is, like KUNCI’s improper education, a form of learning: one that admits limitations, and opens toward the possibility of beginning differently.

Coda

As someone who also organizes the Arts Coordination Annual Meeting in Vietnam — a gathering for coordinators, the people who work behind every visible event — I felt the particular warmth of Share-Meeting 3 with a kind of recognition. It is a room built for people who usually occupy the margins of other rooms. Some working in isolation, some in groups navigating difficulties the rest of us quietly know. To find a place where the difficulty can be named plainly, where uncertainty is not shameful but shared — that is not a small thing.

I left George Town thinking about intensity more than longevity. How often can we do this? How fully? The question of sustainability is finally not a question about duration. It is a question about what we are willing to build carefully enough that it can be handed on — to the next generation, to the next practice, to the person who will someday open that zine, read that newsletter, find that archive, and understand without having been there that something real was made.

The meeting itself — initiated because Takuya and I found ourselves at the same table in Taipei, continued because the research brought me to Yamanaka Suplex in Shiga, completed in a room in George Town with people from seventeen organizations across eight countries — is perhaps its own answer to the question. As Kaho Ikeda – co-director of Yamanaka Suplex concluded: “You build the conditions for the encounter. You show up to the encounter. And from the encounter, something continues that did not exist before.”

Photo: Thum Chia Chieh

About Share Meeting 3:

𝐒𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐞-𝐌𝐞𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝟑: 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐀𝐫𝐭 𝐁𝐨𝐫𝐧 𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐄𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐪𝐮𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬, 𝐓𝐡𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫, 𝐅𝐢𝐫𝐞𝐬, 𝐅𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐬

𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲-𝗠𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 is an informal gathering that brings together independent spaces, artist-run initiatives, and artistic collectives from across East, Southeast, and South Asia.

The meeting functions as a platform for exchange and networking, focusing on how non-public, non-institutional initiatives are sustained—through organizational structures, budgeting, and everyday operational decisions along with artistic practices.

Rather than presenting universal models, 𝗦𝗵𝗮𝗿𝗲-𝗠𝗲𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 creates a space for sharing operational practices, struggles, and workarounds shaped by local conditions and uncontrollable forces, such as earthquakes, thunder, fires, fathers, and pathogens.

▌𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀
March 7 (Sat) & March 8 (Sun) 2026

▌𝗩𝗲𝗻𝘂𝗲:
UAB Building, George Town, Penang, Malaysia

▌𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗿𝘀:
Yamanaka Suplex (Shiga, Japan) | @yamanaka.suplex
Blank Canvas (Penang, Malaysia) | @blankcanvas.penang

▌𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘀𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀
KUNCI Study Forum & Collective (Yogyakarta, Indonesia)
MAIX / Malaysia Artist Intention Experiment (Perak, Malaysia)
ReformARTsi (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia)
Kapallorek Art Space (Perak, Malaysia)
Pangrok Sulap (Sabah, Malaysia)
STORAGE (Bangkok, Thailand)
Spare Bedroom (Manila, Philippines)
Zit-Dim Art Space (Tainan, Taiwan)
Kala Kulo (Kathmandu, Nepal)
TRA-TRAVEL (Osaka, Japan)
SEASUN (Aichi, Japan)
6okken (Yamanashi, Japan)
Center / Alternative Space & Hostel (Tochigi, Japan)
Yellow Pen Club (Seoul, Korea)
Amefurashi (Yamagata, Japan)
DRC No. 12 (Beijing, China)
Think School (Sapporo, Japan)