EXP started in 2023 at 340A Joo Chiat Road — a shophouse a small group of us were renting as a personal third space. Not an office, not a studio exactly. Just somewhere that wasn't home and wasn't work, where we could invite people in and see what happened.

The idea was simple enough: open the space up, invite artists from different disciplines, and create the conditions for things to happen that wouldn't happen in a more formal context. What we didn't expect was how quickly those conditions would produce things none of us had seen before.

Filter n Flow was a ceramic cup exhibition by Synceramic, with live jazz and a music playlist EXP curated to showcase Singapore jazz musicians and composers. Three disciplines sharing a room, each one making the others more interesting. Butter Music — making butter to the sound of live performance — came from the same impulse: what does a familiar activity feel like when art is inseparable from it?

These weren't concepts developed in a meeting. They emerged from proximity — artists from different worlds occupying the same space and finding unexpected overlaps. That became the method.

Not everything landed. The GO-JAM series — monthly jams with a rotating spotlight on different genres and disciplines — revealed something honest about how arts communities actually work: people follow the activity they already love. Jazz audiences come to jazz. The cross-pollination we hoped for wasn't automatic. It had to be designed more carefully, or accepted as a longer project.

Both lessons mattered. PORT37 at Tanjong Pagar Distripark is where we're applying them — with better infrastructure, a bigger room, and a clearer sense of what we're building towards.