We're an art collective.Apparently.
A growing community of artists, curators, and creative minds, coming together from different places, backgrounds, and ways of making.
Once a year, we move somewhere new and make an exhibition.
The place changes. The combinations change. The community grows.
We don't really believe in staying put.
Two people. No plan.
02
It started with a couch.
We met by accident, at the Setouchi Triennale. One of us needed a place to sleep that night and posted a message online — "does anyone have a place for me to sleep?" The other one said yes.
That reply became a couch to sleep on, and — somehow — the beginning of Plum20.
There was no business plan, no five-year strategy. Just two people who kept saying yes to things.
We kept moving.
We've both spent years moving through different places, cultures, and communities — sometimes for art, sometimes for work, sometimes simply because we wanted to see what was around the corner: an installation for Burning Man China, a trip to the Venice Biennale, one of us backpacking through Europe chasing whatever exhibition was around the next corner, the other going from war correspondent in Iraq to international peace work.
We've volunteered in places we couldn't pronounce at first, worked with people we'd never met before, and somehow always found a reason to stay a little longer.
And suddenly, you're part of something.
So we started Plum20.
Plum20 grew from that way of seeing the world.
We believe art can work the same way: you meet someone unexpected, you end up in a strange place, someone introduces someone else, an idea changes along the way.
And before you know it, something exists that nobody could have planned from the beginning.
Because one place is never enough.
A new city changes the conversation. A different space changes the work. Meeting someone unexpected usually makes things more interesting.
So we move. We meet. We experiment. We make things together.
Sometimes it works beautifully. Sometimes it gets weird.
We prefer weird.
Take Tokyo, 2025 — a photographer, two installation artists, a performance artist, and a digital artist, brought together more by circumstance than by plan. IKi ended up looking the way it did because of who happened to be in the room, not because we designed an installation first and went looking for artists to fill it.
No secret formula. Sorry.
Ideas start somewhere. Then artists get involved. Then someone changes the idea. Then someone finds a strange space. Then things get interesting.
The curator gives direction. The artists bring their own worlds.
Nobody is here just to fill a slot.
The community keeps growing.
Plum20 is curator-led. But it started with two people.
One shapes the exhibition. The other helps make the whole thing happen. And around them, the community keeps growing.
Founder
Curator
Shapes each edition of Plum20 — finding the artists, walking the space, deciding what goes where. Years of backpacking through Europe chasing museums and exhibitions probably has something to do with it.
Co-founder
Artist
Went from war correspondent in Iraq to international peace work before helping build Plum20 — usually the one in the room asking "why not."
The exhibition ends. The people don't.