Hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
The Curatorial Roundtable, an international forum for curators and institutional leaders to discuss formative and current projects, is hosted by Steven Henry Madoff, Founding Chair of the MA Curatorial Practice at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Jeph Lo is a curator, sound culture researcher, and Co-founder and Director of TheCube Project Space, a nonprofit art organization based in Taipei. His long-term interests encompass Taiwan’s underground and experimental music, noise movement, sound art, and the cultural politics surrounding these practices. Through exhibitions, publications, podcasts, and music festivals, he explores how sound can serve as a means of historical narration, knowledge production, and public exchange. His major curatorial and research projects include ALTERing NATIVism: Sound Cultures in Post-War Taiwan (co-curator, 2014); Sound Meridians: Cultural Counter-mapping through Sound (2019–); and Sonic Shaman: TheCube Forum Music Festival (2022, 2024, and 2026).
Jeph will discuss Sound Meridians: Cultural Counter-mapping through Sound (2019 and ongoing) and Sonic Shaman: TheCube Forum Music Festival (2022 and ongoing) as two examples of how TheCube Project Space has explored sound culture—a central focus of its long-term practice—through different curatorial forms. Grounded in archives, documentation, and research, Sound Meridians brings together curators and artists from Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia to create connections and alternative mappings between the sound cultures of Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Sonic Shaman, by contrast, uses the music festival as a curatorial form, weaving together experimental sound, independent music, live art, and lectures performance to create a space for sensory experience and collective listening. Situated at two contrasting ends of sound-based curatorial practice—one oriented toward documentary research and critical reading, the other toward embodied and collective experience—the projects offer different approaches to presenting sound culture. His presentation will trace their initial ideas, their transformations during development, and their eventual realization.