Guest Talk: The One- How Localisation Movements Flow from the Local to the Global, China
Public Talk × Cross-disciplinary Sharing
Project Type
Public Programme / Cultural Discourse & Knowledge Exchange
Time & Location
25 April 2025
Xiangzhi Fishing Port, Quanzhou, China
Host
The One Gravity Field (The One 引力聚场)
Venue Partner
Chizi Space赤子空间 & LocalfishCoffee巴浪鱼咖啡
Role
Guest Speaker
Cai Boxuan (Boosen Tsai)
Founder, Escape Arts Club
Background
“The Localisation Wave” is a public discourse programme that responds to the growing attention around “localisation” in contemporary cultural, creative, and lifestyle practices. Rather than treating localisation as a branding strategy or stylistic choice, the programme asks a fundamental question: What problems can localisation actually respond to?
Set against the backdrop of Quanzhou’s fishing port during the seasonal fishing moratorium, the event situates cultural discussion within a lived landscape shaped by labour, climate, history, and everyday rhythms. The choice of site underscores localisation not as abstraction, but as an embodied and time-based practice.
Description
The programme brought together over 20 creators, designers, artists, publishers, cultural organisers, and independent practitioners from Quanzhou, the Minnan region, and across China. Through extended roundtable discussions, case sharing, and open dialogue, participants reflected on long-term local practice across music, visual art, design, publishing, gastronomy, architecture, hospitality, media, and community spaces.
As a guest speaker, Cai Boxuan shared experiences from founding Escape Arts Club during the pandemic and sustaining a decentralised art community across Southeast Asia. Drawing from transregional practice, the discussion reframed localisation as a relational concept—one that extends beyond geographic boundaries and continues through migration, diaspora, and cultural transmission.
Rather than offering definitive answers, the programme functioned as a collective thinking process, foregrounding duration, commitment, and lived experience as the true foundations of localisation. The conversations emphasised that meaningful local practice emerges through time, attention to detail, and continuous self-reflection, rather than rapid replication or spectacle-driven visibility.