Creatives For The Common Good

A Vancouver based artist collective.
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Vancouver

We host art-based community experiences that foster cultural exchange and create face to face human connection for ourselves and the communities we serve.

Words that mean a lot to us.

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COLLABORATION

This is the big one. Art can bridge cultures in a way few other things can. But more than that, art can be the new thing we make together once it’s connected us. Tasai brings differing but compatible creatives together for 1+1=3 connections. We find a mashup of Eastern and Western sensibilities particularly exciting and loaded with possibility.

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BRIDGE

Tasai isn’t about welcoming “foreigners” to “our country.” Tasai isn’t here and it isn’t there, it’s a third place, in the middle. A lot of us, in this increasingly post-colonial world, are exploring in-between identities. We might live in one place, but because we’ve also lived in another place our hearts are somewhere in the middle.

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CONNECTION

What kind of connection? Well, not like LinkedIn. Not networking. It’s face to face and intimate, usually small and relatively quiet. It’s friends and colleagues committed to process over product. At it’s best it’s community.

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FUSION

Fusion is about difference. Like fusion food, difference coming together to make something new and awesome. It’s generative connection. Fusion is the magic sauce that comes from doing collaboration well. We aren’t interested in addition, i.e. the controlled management of pre-classified predictable outcomes. We’re interested in fusion, i.e. exploding into awesome.

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CRAFT

We believe in the individual disciplined pursuit of excellence in one’s chosen craft. We also believe in collective moments of terror filled interdisciplinary experimentation that pull you further and higher than you could have got to alone. We’re interested in becoming more than we could be on our own.

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CATALYST

A growing number of organizations are realizing the need to humanize work. We believe artists are the right people to lead us into the work of humanizing work. We want to stand at the gates of hope and call people toward organizational, systemic, and sustainable change.

Making Art With a Network Mindset

Tasai members got together a couple of years back to talk about what we value, who we are. The result is the six words you find at the bottom of our front page: collaboration, bridge, connection, fusion, craft and catalyst. Under connection it says this: What kind of...

Art For The Art-curious

Everyone is asking you to be creative, but you don’t feel very creative. “I need some art in my life,” you think to yourself. But art is kind of incomprehensible, intimidating even. First, if you’re a human being, you *are* creative. Second, you *do* need more art in...

Good grief!

I wrote a book about lament, so I might be a bit biased, but I find grief and lament turning up a lot lately as important antidotes to many of the diseases of our modern western culture, not the least of which is a severe deficit of meaning.

That’s WEIRD, I’m not feeling like myself.

I think “creative” people are integrated people. They are holistic thinkers. They are facile at integrating analytic thinking and contextual thinking, what I would call object-thinking and place-thinking.

Ecologies of Meaning

That’s why, when you scratch under the surface of the shiny happy condo marketing version of Vancouver, you find people who operate within progressive well intentioned organizations that in turn operate within a progressive well intentioned cultural ethos and yet find themselves a jittery jumble of tenuous identities, their days marked with fragmentation, busy-ness, and to a great extent, loneliness.