Chee-Kien Lai

The inaugural “New Creative Grounds” exhibition and forum in November 2019 connected two major groups of people from Taiwan and five countries in Southeast Asia. Firstly, academics and practitioners shared design pedagogies and conditions across the different countries. Secondly, graduates of architecture schools from those areas interacted with each other through workshops while their graduate design projects were displayed in an exhibition. The understanding and camaraderie among the participants and audiences are now continued in this year's event, which has seen the Covid-19 pandemic disrupting lives but also providing a much-needed context to discuss aspects of architectural education and practice in our time. "New Resilient Grounds" provides a critical lens and mirror which we might use to examine the world and how we may now act. The hybrid form of this year using both on-site and virtual meetings will also attest to this moment of examination.