Min Guhong suddenly decided to apply for the 2026 International Creator Residency Program organized by Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) in Japan. Beginning in May 2026, the program offered an opportunity to spend three months in Tokyo continuing his work and research. Above all, airfare, accommodation, and production costs were fully covered. For Min, said to have been Japanese in a past life, this was a golden opportunity to live parasitically in his hometown for three months, free of charge. The application required three documents: an application form, letters of recommendation, and a portfolio. The portfolio, in particular, had to introduce three projects within six A4 pages.

First, Min prepared the application form. He had to answer four questions, and, as though briefly becoming an artist, set out in detail the thoughts he had wrestled with over ten years.

Define your practice, approach, and artistic interests using four keywords.

• Self-Introduction / Identity: Speaking, writing, and revising oneself. At Min Guhong Manufacturing, all of these processes are performed under the name “company introduction.” A company introduction does not end after one telling; it repeats through manuals, websites, products, and sentences. Introduction is a mode of existence.
• Handmade Web Education / Learning: Learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as sensibilities and attitudes rather than merely technologies. In New Order, these languages provide ways to learn to introduce oneself. Rooted in the spirit of a slow, small web, the web becomes a structure of life rather than simply a screen.
• Editorial Structure / Content and Form: Writing, refining, and arranging sentences. A manual that is also poetic language; an introduction that is also an unauthorized declaration. At Min Guhong Manufacturing, every document and every web page is an experiment in structural editing. Content cannot exist without form, and form continually rewrites content.
• Parasitic Practice / Method and Technology: Staying temporarily rather than becoming independent. A relationship in which one borrows a host’s resources and offers something in return. Operating through writing, the web, and design, this company always lives parasitically somewhere, exploring new technologies and methods through that parasitism.

Describe the concept of your artistic practice in relation to past or ongoing work, in no more than 150 words.

My practice centers on “writing as self-introduction”: structural and poetic writing. Through Min Guhong Manufacturing, a fictional yet real one-person company, I produce self-portrait-like outputs—manuals, websites, and conceptual documents—under the name “products.” These simulate micro-infrastructures and explore how identity is written, edited, and performed. Since 2016, I have run New Order, an experimental class outside formal institutions, working with over 500 participants to use HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as tools for thought and self-formation. Weaving publishing, design, and education into one flow, I treat code, typography, and editorial structures as ways of living beyond their roles as media. This work operates as a recurring act of designing self-introductions, providing a space to redesign the artist’s existence through language, interfaces, and repetition.

Explain why you want to work with TOKAS in Tokyo and what you expect there, in no more than 150 words.

I have long admired Tokyo’s small-scale publishing cultures, fictional infrastructures, and poetic systems: doujin software markets, micro-labels, stationery aesthetics, and theories of “cuteness.” TOKAS appears to me as both a space and a conceptual host for such experimental structures. I would like to temporarily graft Min Guhong Manufacturing, a parasitic one-person company, onto Tokyo’s multilayered creative ecosystem, investigating self-institution through fieldwork, imitation of infrastructures, and quiet observation. I am drawn to Tokyo’s distinctive coexistence of rigor and play, and to how rules are rewritten through form and fiction. I hope TOKAS can become more than a production space: a “company rehearsal apparatus” through which my existence is repeatedly reconstructed through others.

Describe the purpose and plan of your residency, in no more than 200 words.

Artist Simulator is a parasitic proposal exploring how an artist can exist through other people rather than within a space. If selected, Min Guhong Manufacturing—a one-person company performing identity through writing, websites, and conceptual outputs—will temporarily inhabit TOKAS as a parasite and develop three editorial tools:

• A web-based interactive interface for self-introduction
• A poetic script for performing oneself
• A field guide to artistic parasitism

This project combines ten years of Min Guhong Manufacturing, five years of New Order, and “writing as design as editing.” New Order is an educational program teaching coding as conceptual writing; writing, design, and editing are all regarded as acts of self-introduction. Artist Simulator itself experiments with the idea that an artist’s identity is not fixed but can be rehearsed and reconstructed. The artist is not simply “presented” but “rewritten,” because an author exists as an “arrangement” rather than an “origin,” and as a “device” rather than a “declaration.”

Next, Min politely emailed people he respected within and beyond the art and design circles where he had worked for ten years, asking for letters of recommendation. They included Japanese people he had happened to meet. He secretly hoped they might happen to have connections with the selection committee.

Dear Professor,

I hope you are well.

I am writing because I am considering applying for the 2026 International Creator Residency organized by Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS), and would like to ask whether you might be able to provide a letter of recommendation.

The program supports creators in visual art, design, architecture, and film from around the world, enabling them to live in Tokyo for three months to work and conduct research. I hope to use this opportunity to live temporarily as a parasite in Tokyo while exploring writing, coding, and conceptual publishing across online and offline formats.

The details for the recommendation are as follows:
— Language: English or Japanese
— Format: A4 PDF, including the date and a handwritten or digital signature. Otherwise, the format is open and there is no length limit.
— Submission: You do not need to send it directly; I can receive it and submit it with the rest of my application.
— The final deadline is Wednesday, June 25, 2025, at 6 p.m. Japan time. Ideally, I would be able to receive it by Monday, June 23.

If helpful, I can send a description of my work, a CV, or a draft recommendation.

I apologize for making this request while you are busy, but your support would mean a great deal. Please feel free to let me know whether it would be possible, without any obligation.

Sincerely,
Min Guhong

The portfolio came last. He had to present three projects within six A4 pages. Min went through ten years of records one by one. There seemed to be far too much, and it was all rather disorderly. Choosing only three was difficult. So, like a crow soaring through the sky, he widened his view and grouped them into three strands: “Min Guhong Manufacturing,” “New Order,” and “Writing as Design as Editing.” This way, he hoped, every project, large and small, could be gathered into a single orbit.

The application deadline was June 25 at 6 p.m. After that, it would be out of Min’s hands. But if he were selected for the residency, what about AG Lab, where he currently worked? Surely something would work out. Regardless of the result, the process and its by-products become another product of Min Guhong Manufacturing. For some customers, of course, this product may prove a useful cautionary example: a failed example and self-introduction carrying the message that preparing an application for the Tokyo Arts and Space International Creator Residency in this way is guaranteed to fail.