At "Art Action: Festival and Community Revitalization" the 2016 conference for the Artist Village Alliance of Taiwan, participants discussed the relations between art festivals and regional development. Taking these festivals across the globe, we discovered that inviting artists to produce artwork in specific locations provided something more than alternative city marketing. It also spurred cultural revitalization in the city whether generated from the bottom up, driving the progress of policies through civic power, or from the top down, driving local cultural identity through government policies.

This year, we took the discussion of the role of art education and administration in art institutions a step further and focused on making integrated connections and taking diversified actions from within academies, institutions, and civic organizations. Many questions arose. In this era of globalization and digital information, how should the art environment in Taiwan confront the challenges of our time? What should the Taiwanese artists, curators, and art workers, as citizens of the world, do to take part in international affairs – or to encourage the international society to take part in Taiwanese culture?

Developing the power and cultural force of Taiwan requires contributions from civic groups from diverse fields as well as favorable government policies. Just as Cheng Li-chiun, Taiwan's Minister of Culture, stated at the 2017 Culture & Technology Symposium, it is only by breaking through the obsolete bureaucracy and the outdated approaches of policies and governance, and confronting new possibilities with courage that Taiwan can actively respond to the challenges of the new age and transform them into opportunities for new forms of art and culture.

At the annual conference this year, we invited speakers with various perspectives and positions to discuss the art cycle in different cultural backgrounds. Kathryn Weir, Director of the Department of Cultural Development of the Centre Pompidou, started this year's conference with a talk on collective intelligence and public engagement, followed by a speech given by Patrick Flores, curator of the Jorge B. Vargas Museum at the University of the Philippines, about the delicate relationship between art education's criticality and institutionalization within the context of the academic museum.

Later, Director of the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre, Luckana Kunavichayanont, shared with us the practice and promotion of art education with the idea of publicness through the support of government policies, while Marie Fol, Head of Mobility & Advice of Dutch Culture, Centre for International Cooperation, and Marie Le Sourd, Secretary General of online platform On the Move, also gave a brief but thorough introduction about how artists and cultural workers from different cultures utilize modern technologies to accelerate cultural mobility and achieve the best possible results from self-learning. These shared experiences from unique perspectives in the art industry helped us gain a better understanding of the cycle and division of work in the ecological chain of art.