Since 2014, the shared studio Yamanaka Suplex has been organizing and hosting Share-Meeting, a series of initiatives focused on independent, alternative, and non-profit art spaces and collectives in Japan. Through these informal gatherings, participants have shared how their practices are sustained and what kinds of operational structures they have developed to continue their activities.

At the Share-Meeting held in fiscal year 2023, titled “Go Alone? Arrive Faster? Aim Further? Die Together?,” eight organizations—primarily from within Japan—were invited to participate. The gathering fostered an intensive exchange based on the sharing of accumulated know-how, and brought together organizations and individuals who had not previously been connected, resulting in the emergence of numerous new networks and collaborative projects.

Similarly, Share-Meeting 2, held in fiscal year 2024 under the title “The Successive Gathering and Momentum of Becoming”, brought together eight groups such as independently run spaces, residency programs, networks, and committees operating within and beyond Japan. The meeting facilitated dense and meaningful exchanges among invited participants as well as younger practitioners and members of the general public. Among the participants was also a collective based in Thailand, signaling early signs and anticipation of the next phase of international exchange.

With Share-Meeting 3, the third iteration of the program, the organizers aim to further expand these horizontal networks by holding the meeting outside Japan for the first time. The event will take place on Penang Island in northern Malaysia—an important site with historical ties to Japan, including during the Second World War. In collaboration with the local independent art platform Blank Canvas based in George Town, Share-Meeting 3 is conceived as an international forum for sharing and discussing autonomous artistic practices and modes of operation across East, Southeast, and South Asia.

Through this meeting, participants will explore how non-public and non-institutional initiatives are sustained—examining organizational structures, budgeting, everyday operational decision-making, and artistic practices. Rather than pursuing a single, universal institutional model, Share-Meeting 3 seeks to create a space for sharing operational practices, struggles, and workarounds shaped by local conditions and by forces that are fundamentally beyond control, such as tectonic shifts, natural phenomena, disasters, patriarchal systems, and global-scale viruses.