TAIPEI AS A NODE OF INNOVATION

Participants: Yipei Lee (SUAVEART, Taipei), Sean Tseng (ss space space. Taipei.), Shu‑Jung Chao (artist-in-residence at Hangar, Taipei) | Moderated by Veronica Valentini (Hangar- Barcelona)

As part of Polar & Tropic, the central curatorial program at Swab connecting art scenes between Northern Europe and the Southeast Pacific, this roundtable focuses on emerging contemporary practices within the Southeast Asian context, with a particular emphasis on Taiwan as a reference and exchange node.

In recent years, Taiwan has become a key meeting point for new curatorial models, artist-run spaces, and experimental formats, reflecting broader dynamism across Southeast Asia. From translocal networks to flexible institutional approaches, the region offers fertile ground for rethinking modes of artistic production, collaboration, and discourse creation.

Through the voices of curators and artists, this conversation will explore how these dynamics take shape at the local level, often via artist-run and independent initiatives, while maintaining active dialogue with the wider region. Taiwan’s role as a connector in this panorama allows us to reflect on how Southeast Asian practices resonate with, or diverge from, Western paradigms, not through opposition but through differentiation, friction, and parallel innovation.

Finally, existing connections between Taiwan and contexts such as Barcelona and the Mediterranean will be highlighted, via residency programs and initiatives that build bridges beyond geography and dominant narratives.

CARTOGRAPHIES OF A NEW COLLECTING: Complicities, Networks, and Affections

This conversation seeks to explore forms of collecting that expand the traditional notion of a collection and go beyond the possession of physical objects. Rather than focusing on the artwork as a material good, it discusses practices that prioritize long-term accompaniment, relationship-building, and shared care. From private foundations and hybrid...

BEYOND THE MARKET: Tokyo Seoul

Following the path opened by Focus Tokyo-Seoul last year—a program that allowed us to place the resonances and tensions between both scenes in parallel—this roundtable seeks to delve into how the economic and cultural conditions of each context shape their artistic landscapes today. In Seoul, the dynamism of a rapidly...

SOFT GALLERIES: Projects Attuned to the Present

This session brings together galleries from Swab’s general program that are rethinking their models toward the territorial, the emergent, and the processual. These initiatives show a will to expand and diversify the role of the gallery. Through close engagement with geography—whether rural contexts, second venues, or long-term relationships with artists—these...

(IN)DEPENDENT SOLO

In recent years, independent spaces have ceased to be an exception or anomaly within the artistic ecosystem and have become an active and increasingly visible part of the cultural landscape. These spaces often emerge from necessity, urgency, intuition, or resistance, and over time they consolidate as places of production, thought,...

RHYTHMS OF EXCHANGE: Voices between Latin America and Europe

A conversation among spaces founded by Latin American cultural agents who, from different trajectories, are generating new artistic, affective, and collaborative communities rooted in displacement and migration. Historically, Spain has been one of the main entry points into Europe for Latin American artists and cultural workers—due to linguistic, historical, familial,...

SPACE AND ACTION: Strategies of Dialogue Between Performative Practices and the Gallery Ecosystem

Juan Hidalgo, founder of ZAJ, the pioneering collective of this language in Spain, once stated that performance is an art of space and action. A body that does something for a period of time, and yes, in a specific space. A space that has very often, of course, been an...