Subterranea is a Taiwan-Latvia art and technology exchange between Zone Sound Creative and RIXC Center for New Media Culture in Riga, Latvia. Planned by Zone Sound Creative and its platform Sonic Sensory Lab together with RIXC, the project began in 2025 and ran to June 2026. It sent three Taiwanese artists to Riga for residencies of up to two months, then carried their research into an exhibition series, a public talk and two research reports.
The partner
RIXC works across art, science and new media. It runs an annual art science festival and publishes the journal Acoustic Space. It hosted the artists at two sites: a residency in central Riga and a rural base, RIXC Fields, outside the city.
The artists in Riga
Yuchin Chen, who took part together with Lilac Red, was in residence in summer 2025 at the rural base. Tuan Mu followed in autumn 2025, based in the city and making repeated field visits to Ķemeri National Park, a peat bog landscape. Chia-Yi Chen completed the third residency in late spring and early summer 2026.
Work from the residencies reached local audiences. Tuan Mu and French composer Rodolphe Macabéo showed the augmented reality work Ember at the 2025 RIXC Art Science Festival, themed Plants Intelligence, and performed Fire dwells in Xylem at RIXC Gallery.
Exhibition and talk
An international exchange exhibition series extends the residencies. Its first exhibition, Where Fire Stirs Within by Tuan Mu and Rodolphe Macabéo, ran from 12 September to 4 October 2026 at Sonic Sensory Lab in the Taipei Music Center. It brought together their recent projects, from the wildfire landscapes of the Dune of Pilat in France to the wetlands of Ķemeri in Latvia.
In autumn 2026 the project held a public talk in Taipei on residency experience. Tuan Mu described how cold weather and short daylight changed the conditions for fieldwork, and Chia-Yi Chen described how introductions from local people shaped her field routes. They also said a short residency does not need to end with a finished work: fieldwork, material collection and technical prototypes count as results.
Research reports
In December 2025 the studio published two research reports. One looks at how sensing technologies and data shape artistic work in the project. The other examines the institutional side of the exchange, including how the two-site residency model was used and what the Taiwan-Latvia relationship means for both sides.
The studio's role
Zone Sound Creative co-planned the project, selected and sent the artists, and organized the exhibition series, talk and research that followed. In December 2025 Po-Hao Chi, the studio's founder, spoke about the project at the Link in Progress forum in Taipei, describing his shift from invited resident to the person who arranges residencies for other artists.
The reports describe Taiwan and Latvia as two small countries with comparable historical and political pressures, and treat the exchange as a way to build shared knowledge rather than only to send out work. Taiwan's representative office in Latvia publicly invited audiences to the artists' presentations.
Project page (in Chinese): 《潛域》臺拉科藝交流計畫 Subterranea - Taiwan x Latvia
