‘Off Centre: Elsewhere in Practice’ is a talk and editorial series initiated by esea contemporary Director Xiaowen Zhu, exploring how contemporary art is shaped beyond dominant cultural centres. Bringing together artists, curators, writers, and researchers working across East and Southeast Asia, the series foregrounds practices rooted in specific places, where artistic work develops through everyday life, local knowledge, and long-term engagement with communities.

Moving across urban villages, county towns, coastal regions, and regional networks, the series examines how artistic practice responds to labour, migration, ecology, and social change. Rather than positioning these places as peripheral to cultural production, Off Centre understands them as sites where cultural life is actively produced, negotiated, and sustained.

Together, the talks and accompanying essays consider how artistic practice is shaped by lived conditions rather than institutional proximity. Tracing connections across diverse contexts through questions of care, labour, knowledge, and placemaking, they attend to the ways art is produced, circulated, and sustained within situated environments, while asking how these sites, in turn, generate their own cultural imaginaries and forms of collective life.