Another round.

In 2025, someone is going to ask you to go to Taiwan and do a Goblin Market in a city called Hsinchu.

It is very important that you go and do it.

An inch of sunshine moves across my table, through the slit between two curtains. The winter's sun is as sharp as its cold wind. I’m sipping tea, completely in awe of the fact that there’s a lineage of tea-making that chose to optimize for pondering the passing of time.

There’s nothing more poignant than the elusive scents, the volatile compounds, in marking such a concept. A serving of tea can, on rare occasions, cost hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars at the right place and time. It's one of the things that you have to try for yourself, and go down a rabbit hole of "a guy who knows a guy who knows another guy" to get to the bottom of it.

It isn’t easy to imagine that sniffing and tasting a short-lived moment is worth so much, as I’m perfectly content with my very reasonable purchase from a tea wholesaler in Taipei. I mean, how do you price something as unquantifiable as scent suspended in water and air, only perceivable for mere seconds upon coating the inside of one’s mouth at just the right temperature? Or do you price for the serendipity of being at the right place at the right time? 

The only way to truly let a beautiful tea persist is to continue tending to everything that sustains it. Terrain, climate, people, culture, craft, techniques, technologies, and their philosophical and aesthetic underpinning. Every moment layers onto one another, melting into distinct scents, smells, and even sounds—the sound of the tea leaves transforming over a roasty fire.

We can always make a case that it’s the rarity or the crafted nature of certain types of tea, tethered to a particular terrain, that gives them their value. But even when all the conditions align, someone needs to sit with it, taste it, and savour all that it embodies. There will be one less cup of that same batch of tea if you drink it, and it will be a waste for it to go unenjoyed until it finally succumbs to poor storage and time. 

Art feels the same way. Bo Le glanced at the thousand-mile horse. The kismet of two people finding each other, through tracing music among mountains and streams.

伯樂相千里馬。高山流水遇知音。

Nothing compares to meeting the people who are down to join you on an adventure and actually go on that adventure without the certainty of anything working as planned.

I mean, drop what you are doing in your normal life and come to Taiwan for a whimsical art thing. Who does that?

Of course, it's more than just a whimsical art thing. Pardon my self-deprecating jokes.

Here's a glimpse of the casually amazing artists and cultural workers in Taiwan who created a soft landing pad for Canadian artists:

How does something like tea persist throughout history and still manage to survive the crushing weight of modernity’s endless pursuit of efficiency and infinite scale? How does this economy even make sense when the logical thing is extracting as much tea-ness as possible?

I don’t have answers. All I know is that I have a finite amount of time with this small pinch of tea in front of me, before the passing of time eventually washes its essence into a light trace barely perceivable—all its scent and taste: orchid, magnolia, cinnamon, sunshine on a cat’s little forehead…unattainable. 

We don’t talk about this enough today—about spending time on what can’t be owned and can only be experienced momentarily.

There's still magic in a less-than-perfect world. At least when taking a sip of tea, you are "stealing" an inch of time back for yourself, from the machines, from the mentality of doing more.

I sometimes chuckle at the stark differences between those who drink tea as an excuse to do nothing or to banter and those who drink tea for its benefits, trace minerals, peptides, zen-ness, and as an alternative to caffeine. I can be a little bit of both, or neither. Depending on the day.

The cynicism of a time marked by "why do anything at all?"

When speaking of material production, labour and time are a fair trade for other benefits. I offer my efforts in exchange for a material return I can't produce on my own. The Industrial Revolution made manual, time-consuming crafts precarious. A commitment to craft turns work into an artistic pursuit that no machines can replace. Many artists still cite this as their main argument against AI art, but as we have seen, it’s only a matter of time before a bot becomes good enough to produce at the price point we are willing to pay for craft. The trouble isn’t how good you are with your craft, but how this notion of “craft” situates itself in the broader value system. Efficiency and scale are at odds with such wasteful use of time. Imagine holding an impossibly beautiful, perfect lacquerware cup in your hands that took an artisan an entire year to make, drawing on decades of practice, and thinking, there must be an easier way to make a decent cup that serves the same purpose. 

We then moved on to information and the subtle signalling of trends and forecasts. The ability to generate interesting ideas and deliver on them is a valuable thing to trade for a price. A unique point of view sets you apart from others. Art is about ideas and concepts. At this point, our lives extend far beyond the material landscape. Corporate nation-building, as exemplified by Meta, OpenAI, Google, and various tech entanglements with the geopolitics of a digitally augmented reality. These tech companies are no longer just "big tech.” They have pursued nation-scale ambitions, creating enclaves on material land that rely on precision and predictability through control. This creates a strange dialogue with the precision and control in craft that strives for the impossibility of human limits. Of course, machines can be more precise, more perfect, and arguably more efficient at predictably and consistently producing outputs, but an anomaly in the system brings more discomfort, even panic, than delight. Aren’t ideas themselves some anomaly in the monotonous stream of business-as-usual? 

The machine, metaphorically, is unlikely to invest resources in a strange enough idea. Whether people or algorithms run this machine, an anomaly slows things down. In many cases, a complete reimagination of its processes is required, but sunk costs prevent changing routes. Art is incredibly inefficient and wasteful in the eyes of people who genuinely believe in efficiency and the removal of any friction. Yet, art is oddly good at generating new processes through experimentation. Capping art with a system that aims to become efficient, the funding system, for example, pushes artists or arts administrators to play Tetris in all the wrong places. It takes an organization willing to shoulder the risks of nourishing strange ideas to grow the arts into something meaningful. Our project host in Taiwan, Yu-Hsuan, did this for many artists, including us, through Artsite and the Taiwan Art Spaces Alliance—creating pockets within rigid systems that allow experiments to take place. This aspect manifests tangibly in navigating bureaucracies, forging relationships with local communities, and developing new metrics to measure impact beyond economic markers. Every little bit of this work tips the scale toward better communication of the value of arts and culture. 

Three iterations of Goblin Market in one year proved that meeting audiences face-to-face, in community, has merit when everything we do is overwhelmingly mediated—digitally, through a liaison, or across the artificial separation between artists and “regular people.” Goblin Market still didn’t make bank, but somehow this model continues to see artists taking the space to experiment in ways that galleries and museums might hesitate to support without the certainty of measurable, directly corresponding positive outcomes that meet funding requirements. 

The Hsinchu iteration of Goblin Market also saw oblique ways money put itself to work, generating a small but not insignificant return. 

Yunshan (https://sites.google.com/view/lyuyunshan/work) designed a clever mechanism for “buying” their artwork by balancing what one is willing to surrender against the artwork's weight. The results? A bucket of coins and miscellaneous items from people’s wallets. IDs, keys and bank cards have been returned to their rightful owners—it is still a myth why people, in a pinch, choose to surrender these items. Is this the physical incarnation of accepting all terms and conditions when being put on the spot?

Artist Hui’s story of Piggy shows her putting her own money on the line and subsequently having almost all of it taken from the installation. Because the artist chose not to be on-site, the upfront investment to stage the intervention and a very real risk of losing real money (despite being small amounts) went unseen. This tension is pulling at a strange place in my heart as I continue to hustle for limited, highly competitive grant funding, taking on the risks and time, energy, and “ideas” that went unremunerated. The same goes for pursuing various projects and opportunities outside the known funding ecosystem. On the other hand, perhaps artistic experiments are among the few things that allow you to act on a future that isn’t here yet—not just speculation or the cultish question of "what if" without solutions.

The autonomy and agency that come with having a stake in the game are unmatched. It hurts, and it bleeds. It more often goes uncompensated to a point that the unjust compensation wrapped in the form of charity or pity feels like salt on a wound.

Artist, mother, educator, and wielder of wonders, Ayano brought forth a very real tug-of-war between the value of art in people's lives and how much of it can be compensated with money. This uncertainty extends into another vein of anxiety that perhaps many people don't get to explore: who gets to be a contributor to the economy? Is being a contributor to the economy all that matters for measuring a person's worth in society? Amid complexities in work visa statuses and citizenship that determine social and economic mobility, The School of Wonder is more than a place for curiosity and community. It is an artist being relentless about keeping all the beautiful and wondrous parts of life unsevered from life itself. We are witnessing her work from the very real place of seeing politicians cutting school budgets and tech giants downplaying the significance of education in our face. I relate to it this way, even if it's not the artist's intent. The pursuit of wonder is in many ways, the pursuit of meaning itself.

By some obscure miracle (or local superstition), the ensemble of Husna, Benjamin, and me found a total of 60 NTD in coins thrown into our water feature. I suppose that’s how the Fountain of Trevi collects an estimated 4,000 euros daily, just from wishes that may or may not come true. Days before the event, we visited a temple in Taipei with a koi pond. Despite the signs reading “Please Do Not Throw Coins Into The Pond,” coins lined the bottom of the koi pond in abundance, and people kept adding more.

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The concept of a good trade is highly abstract—the only thing we know is that people can want different things. There’s no correlation between “good” art and earning good money. The idea of a time-based rate in the arts is also proven to be a horrible deal. 

The market is unpredictable, but also predictable in these very human ways.

It can be a hopeful thing for artists during a time when marketing and selling works the “proper” way makes barely any sense. 

Despite not turning a profit at all (while dragging a bunch of artists into the deep shipwrecked waters with us), the most unexpected but delightful realization is that finding an audience is surprisingly like fermenting sauerkraut. Of course, there's the imperative of good ingredients, right conditions, and somewhat of a recipe. Behind all of that, it's the surface area for culture to propagate that you need, but always overlook. So you do the laborious work to chop up the cabbage before massaging salt into every nook and cranny. You do this with absolute dedication to the saurerkraut and everything sustaining your sauerkraut practice.

Or, absolute dedication to your art and everything/everyone sustaining your art.

Your call.

Happy 2026.

Spoiler alert: There's going to be another Goblin Market (or perhaps more), I can't say where. I know it reaches into the sea. One of the readers here is responsible. We are grateful for you being Bo Le to us.