Independent curator Zhang Yangyu, together with Guo Lidong, who is a young scholar in folklore and religious studies, and artists Iijima Momoyo, Kikuchi Tomoko, and Yamagishi Genbu, conducted a six-month-long reading seminar on the theme of “suffering and empathy”. Based on this, each participant created works such as videos, installations, and poems in the following months, which were eventually included in the exhibition titled “There we all are, suffering” which Zhang curated. Together in the exhibition were works by visual ethnographer Dipesh Kharel (& Asami Saito), performance artists Tung Jit Yang & Bryan Chang, designer Xiaoyu Yang, and designer/illustrator Amanda Dong. Apart from the artist talk and the gallery tour, the exhibition also held a roundtable discussion titled “Imagination towards ‘Suffering’” with veteran scholars Kimishima Ayako (religious scholar and artist), Sato Takehiro (religious anthropologist), and Suga Yutaka (folklorist).