On to the next leg of the journey.
Dispatch #9 | Luisa Ji | May 22, 2025
Writing over the past few weeks has been challenging for many, many reasons, but "change" is the common thread. Nothing feels more visceral than being whacked in the face by changes you knew were coming for a long time. The anticipation doesn't make it hurt less. However, I did have the time to explore the kinds of stories I want to inhabit while riding this wave. Being anchored in a narrative that I get to shape and transform when certainty isn't promised offers a strange relief.
I’m tuning into my instincts and adjusting how I approach this blog in ways that suit me. The posts will be delivered at a slower pace and reoriented towards my continued exploration of how arts and culture exist not simply as the frivolous pursuit of spectacle but as an act of witnessing, responding, and transforming. You will continue to pursue adventures in creating art in financially sustainable and, most importantly, relational ways. Some of your favourite Goblin Market contributors and co-designers will still make appearances.
Whatever comes next for Goblin Market will be a part of this process. Despite funding coming to an end, the work never really stops. This project offered many insights on organizing means of making, presentation, programming, and mutual support when money in the arts becomes increasingly scarce. Money is scarce, not simply because the economy is bad. It signals that in the face of volatility, people are bracing for impact and opting to put money in survival and what they perceive as safer bets. Financialized art is highly volatile. Socially engaged art is, well, free. The global withdrawal of public arts funding also reflects how the arts and many incredibly valuable cultural practices aren't commonly leveraged to create new social relationships, instruments for change, and pools of knowledge to draw from for braving uncertainty. (Or, in some places, arts and culture are devalued and diminished precisely because of this power.)
I grew up in a whole experiment of a special economic zone, Shenzhen. It started as a political will, an educated guess, a perfect condition, a fiction built from speculations, and a narrative that is repeated in everyone’s mind until it becomes a belief and then a reality. The soft belly to attack is that the city developed as quickly as running a game simulation lacks culture. However, from this undesired mishmash of cultural soup, many brilliant people took the opportunity to make a home in Shenzhen, and these people truly believed in their drive to create something out of a messy situation or uncover value where others overlooked it. Emerging from this messy, cacophonous whole, residents are often proud to tell you that they know of this secret shop hidden among the maze of “handshake apartment buildings” that no tourists dare to enter. They’d tell you stories about the shop owner and the lengths they’d go to make their shop so special, sprinkled with fiction to spice up the conversation. Shenzhen is filled with these unexpected encounters, underneath the tales that the West is fixated on—tech, manufacturing, and where the future is made. It’s a strange place to have grown up in, witnessed its growing pains, and later in life, grown apart. Nobody knows how exactly Shenzhen worked as a speed run of a city besides the nebulous magic in the narrative of "nobody is an outsider, and anyone can make a home here if they put in the work." There are fewer and fewer openings for that now, as the city feels more settled in the traditional sense. In some ways, through my works, I pay tribute to the narrative shift Shenzhen offered—a chance to make where you landed a place of your own, where other cities ask you to conform. I sincerely believe cultural production is a way of slipping agency into people’s pockets without them realizing it. It isn’t a sudden impact, but a long-winded scheme unfolding until one day, you recognize that change has already happened and you wouldn't trade places with you from a year ago. This is why I do this work.
This project, initially with a cumbersome title, Re-imagining Alternative Arts Marketplace, exists because of the urge to create a more connected way of making and presenting arts and cultural projects during a time when sudden impact leaves only a crater of what change could have been. In the earliest draft, I wanted to pursue this connection through material production, with a romanticism for natural materials and crafts that are close to the ground or represent some identity attached to a distant past. Soon, it becomes more apparent that a medium that proliferates modern systems already exists, regardless of place or artistic discipline, in commerce. It is also the exact medium that artists and cultural workers shy away from or approach with heavy baggage. The starving artist trope doesn’t come out of thin air.
The different ways of funding one’s practice mean being employed in non-arts roles or being self-employed. The latter offers freedom, while the former offers some stability. Where public funding bodies directly support artists, being able to write grant proposals is also a strength to bring additional resources into sustaining a relatively smooth-sailing practice. Other ways to stay afloat are marrying rich, being born rich, or having unexpected life-changing wealth through a chance event or pure luck. People rarely tell you “how” it is done. In my experience of working with artists at various stages of their careers, knowing what they need to do while faced with the uncertainty of not knowing exactly how to do the “what” often stagnates the process. Stopping or slowing down are common responses, but they are unhelpful at the very least. When unchecked, it grows into devaluing one's own time and subsequently devaluing others' time. How do we get moving again when a temporary rest becomes a complete stop? How do we keep moving when the outcome is uncertain and unclear?
Goblin Market—Prototyping Alternative Marketplace began with a thesis about organizing arts programming: keeping pace and reaching a milestone without having to be perfect. A polished piece of work is not a prerequisite for continuing one's process or seeking approval to carry on one's art.
Modern production demands predictable outcomes. A volatile future cannot guarantee predictability. Promising predictability or a chance to regret is good business.
If you’ve ever wanted to cross a running stream by stepping on rocks, take it one step at a time. Steadily, making sure you have a firm grip on the slippery rock beneath and then onto the next rock, the next rock, the next rock, until you are at the other shore.
What happens when you can’t see the other shore?
Do you turn back?
Do you keep going?
With artistic inquiries and the process of making art, reaching an outcome that precisely resembles your vision when you first started is not promised. If anything, the most impactful measure for arts and cultural production is how much an artist has changed from before they start a project to when they deliver it. Similarly, with audiences experiencing art of any medium, how have they changed upon witnessing the work? And for you, are you ever afraid of what you will become after changing or being changed, perhaps by a piece of art?
An element of Goblin Market is that it offers a format or is structured as a container that holds something fluid in a temporary shape. The venue for the activities is not merely a backdrop but a character that influences how people navigate through space and engage with various activities. The certainty is that we will activate an otherwise stagnant space, involve the public in the artistic process, and create an experience for people to engage with art through interaction, imagination, and a wondrous series of activities that demand more than just spectatorship. The doubt that often arises concerns whether initiatives aimed at the public good or social impact should be offered at low cost or for free, which over time can lead to perceptions of being “cheap” when these experiences are quite costly to produce.
However, when we tease out marketing trends, brands with strong artistic and creative partnerships with artists attract more customers by offering something that departs from buying and selling commodities to dealing with unique stories and aspirations. Suddenly, with the narrative shift, something that can be experienced for free or at a low cost has value when an entity makes a return down the line. Gentle Monster pivoted from a sunglasses production company to a global phenomenon by designing the experience of their storefronts as an art installation. It replicates the same strategy across multiple brands under its corporate structure. The experience is available at different price points—visiting and seeing the seasonal installations is practically free, a cake at NUDAKE can be afforded by many for their special occasion, while Gentle Monster and Tamburins cater to clientele with much more disposable income and spending potential. The works on display aren’t necessarily life-changing nor have much meaning to uncover, but they satiate a need that can only be filled through an aesthetic experience. People are not buying a product. People buy something associated with beauty and expression—something we are deprived of daily. This trend isn’t “emerging.” It is tried and true. Hermès invests heavily in the arts and cultural production, particularly in art forms that highlight material craft and discipline. Many stores are doubling as art galleries featuring artists at the cusp of breaking through and capturing the value of the elusive “good taste” before it becomes recognizably profitable. With the convenience of online shopping, the role of physical storefronts has shifted tremendously from merely displaying goods and shouting at people to attract them to the products, to becoming spaces for lingering and for people to inhabit a temporary fiction. Goblin Market proposes to take this outside the commercial context and position it within areas of public imagination.
Many public and privately managed services with extensive physical infrastructures are becoming increasingly digital, and the previously occupied spaces are no longer at full capacity and need transformation. Bank branches with vacant offices, once assigned to in-branch financial advisors, come to mind. Interestingly, these spaces are not typically tourist destinations but locations that residents in the area can easily access. Activating these spaces creates opportunities for chance encounters, joy, and forming new social connections with audiences already in place. The fact that Goblin Market attracted many passersby and transformed their brief errands into an unexpected evening outing in both Toronto and Montreal iterations highlights the need for art to exist where people are, differentiating from the format of arts and cultural venues being a destination. In contrast to typical art presentations where the audience acts as consumers and spectators, what Goblin Market offers is the permission to linger, interact, and immerse oneself in a different narrative space—a place to practice being in a more desirable future before it is realized, an opportunity to build new associations with spaces that currently feel like errands and inconveniences.
Cities and nations build their cultural identity through art and design, shifting perceptions, as being recognized as a creative economy signals prosperity more than an economy based on natural resources or production. Shenzhen invested significant resources into culture to shake the perception of being a city-scale electronic parts factory. Although it heavily relies on natural resources and manufacturing, concepts such as sauna, lifestyle, and design often come to mind first when discussing Finland. Recognizing value or impact through shifting perceptions and transforming the narrative surrounding a place—or a brand—is neither straightforward nor immediate. We tell stories about the neighbourhoods we inhabit as well. Often, we are more aware of which neighbourhoods are pricier than we are of what lives are lived within them. We tend to focus on financial narratives when discussing the places we call homes. We hesitate to paint our walls in vibrant colours, fearing it might diminish property value or jeopardize our security deposit. We surrender the beauty of creating a lived-in space for the certainty of not losing what we’ve invested in the future. Can’t lose if you don’t have it in the first place.
We experience similar anxiety when discussing the environment, economic instability, and the threat of AI automating and churning out narratives we can’t control at a rapid pace. We are offered the chance to see the future without knowing how to get there or how to intervene and be a co-creator of its unfolding. We fear that others will undo our actions, so we hesitate to put efforts into what needs changing. We know software iterates in sprints. We know tech companies receive generous resources for research and development, where failure is reframed as learning. As consumers of these technologies, we think of an occasional bug here and there as a normal experience, but not when it comes to experiencing art. As for culture, we need space for research and development, which means shaping conditions where pursuing excellence doesn’t stand in the way of curiosity and exploration. We arrived at a timeline where artists and cultural producers are afraid of putting works out into the world, while technologies pushing and pulling our lives daily get away with bugs and even dubious practices to be fixed later. This makes it difficult for artists to create truly transformative works and settle for producing safe and predictable results, often rewarded for questioning no rules. Why are we repeating to ourselves that the future is volatile, while we carry on doing the things that precisely do not prepare us for that volatile future? Comfort?
We must shift how we experience arts and culture to be better prepared for facing an undesirable world in which we have to figure things out in unconventional ways. I hope Goblin Market provides space for the public to encounter arts and culture as a process and a practice of gradually making meaning and figuring things out, rather than as a given, finished, finalized piece.
All photos captured at Montreal iteration of Goblin Market by Anna Arrobas