One Good Connection: What I Found at Jia Curated 2026 in Bali.

V83 Bali chair by Sander Wassink, presented by Method Inc. An ongoing project, the V-series chairs are based on a shared aluminium joint system, developed by combining materials available in each local context.

Janur, debut outdoor lighting collection by Ong Cen Kuang (OCK) Atelier. Photo: Iwan Sastrawan.

Table lamp by Alami.

Floor lamp by Alami and chair in collaboration with Juno.

Jasser Aguila’s wild mushroom-inspired piece, made from pineapple fibres, was presented as part of the Tomorrow Pavilion, which paired 11 young Filipino designers with 10 Philippine heritage manufacturers.

Max Lamb’s recycled plastic chair for Wasted by Potato Head. Photo: Priscilla Larasati Kemur.

Table and Floor lamp made from coffee-waste leather by Bell Living Lab.

I met the Australian architect Peter Stutchbury before I got to Bali. Same flight, same row, both of us headed to Jia Curated where he was speaking on the final day. He has built more than 150 projects and (rightfully) gives very little to the press, and there I was with seven hours of his brilliant mind all to myself somewhere over the Timor Sea. Sixteen years of doing this and I still can’t believe my luck sometimes.

At the time, that’s exactly what I thought it was. Luck. By the end of the week I’d changed my mind.

What it is

The last design event I went to in Asia was Salone del Mobile Shanghai in 2017, a European fair transplanted. This was the opposite—entirely of its place.

Jia Curated is hard to describe, which is the first good sign. Budiman Ong, who founded it with Rudi Winata and Yang Yang Hartono, told me it can’t really be called a fair or a festival. He’s right. I told him that not fitting the box is what defines most of the good things now. He referred to it as a creative evolving ecosystem, which is the only description I’ve heard that fits.

Two hundred and fifty-odd brands. Five days. A talks programme, installations, live music, food, and a beach. This was the fifth edition and the first one on sand. Call it a trade show, and you’ve missed the beach. Call it a festival, and you’ve missed the commerce, which is real, and which nobody there pretends isn’t.

Jia means home in Chinese. “We’ve complicated the idea of home,” Budiman said. “Home is simple. Somewhere you’re comfortable, somewhere you feel at ease.” Somewhere you can have people over, eat well, and put on music. That’s the brief. The whole thing has been reverse-engineered from it.

Jia Curated vibes. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

Designed by Spatial Sonata, Oaken’s Tiltroom was built from salt bricks by Tuscany Stone Boutique. Photo: Courtesy of Oaken.

Main Main Pavilion by Blancostudio, in collaboration with Kalpa Taru Bali and Bali Landscape Company, won Best Exhibition Booth at Jia Curated 2026.

Project Benih took place inside BaleBio, a regenerative bamboo structure designed by Cave Urban. Photo: Indra Wiras.

Wasted By Potato Head pavilion. Photo: Indra Wiras.

OCK’s immersive installation at Jia Curated was dedicated to Janur outdoor lighting collection. Photos: Iwan Sastrawan.

Bird’s-eye view of the Architecture In Scale exhibition curated by Charmaine Chan, which brought together twenty-five models of completed buildings from Indonesia and across Asia.

Tao temple building (Taiwan, 2018) by Kengo Kuma was one of the subjects of the Architecture In Scale exhibition.

Architecture In Scale exhibition showing the model of Kengo Kuma building seen above. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

Architecture In Scale exhibition by night. Photo: Indra Wiras.

Nature Weave

Design event themes are usually a paragraph on a wall that everyone has stopped reading by day two, but Jia’s 2026 Nature Weave theme was different.

The premise is that we are not standing outside nature admiring it. We’re inside it, made by it, dependent on it. Biophilia sits at the centre—the case that natural light, planting and organic material do considerably more than look nice, that they settle us and hold us together. From there it moves to coexistence. Design made not only for people but with and for landscapes, ecosystems and other species. Gentler, less extractive, more intuitive. Easy to write, much harder to build.

The 2026 edition, held 13 – 17 August, moved to Pengembak Beach in Sanur. Fifteen thousand square metres on Bali’s eastern shoreline, pine trees and mangroves, a river cutting through, open to sunrise and sunset both, which almost nothing on this island is. Budiman has described the site as feeling less like a venue than a collaborator, and that sounds like a lovely line until you walk it. The wind through the trees, the shifting light, the tide coming in and out under everything. None of it was designed around—it was designed with.

Which meant the structures had to behave themselves. Blancostudio and Kalpa Taru Bali built Main Main Pavilion around four raw teak slabs and a set of custom game boards, made from offcuts of their own production, and took Best Exhibition Booth for it. Tables and seating from recycled cardboard tubes. Plastic buckets doing duty as plinths. Oaken’s Tiltroom, a sunken pavilion designed by Spatial Sonata and built from salt bricks.

Putting something this size on a beach has costs. Sand and dust get into everything, and the bathroom situation was a real problem. (It was also pretty damn hot, although a local told me how cool it was, especially in the evenings, while I sweated through everything I owned.) All of it is the price of being on the sand, and the sand is the whole point.

Scenes from Project Benih. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

The ceiling of BaleBio, a regenerative bamboo structure, designed by Cave Urban. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

Relight series in vintage patterned glass by Taiwanese designer Chang Po-Chieh. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

Denny R Priyatna’s Meraphy Lamp Version 2, in foam and metal, a strange and captivating object. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

Extraordinary textile art seen at Project Benih. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

Hand-glazed ceramic tiles by Gridwerk, spotted on the stand by Kolektif Matter. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

(Left to right) Architecture legends only: Peter Stutchbury reunited with Andra Matin 30 years after meeting at a conference; When that afternoon sun hits on Pengembak Beach; and yours truly trying to keep cool with iced coffee. Photos: Dana Tomić Hughes.

The work

Project Benih launched here—benih is Indonesian for seed—and it’s the part of Jia Curated I’ll be watching. It pairs designers with artisans and manufacturers across Indonesia, Taiwan and Japan, and this year was only the introduction. The designers were shown alongside candidate makers, the matches happen afterwards, and the resulting collection arrives in 2027. The ambition underneath it is that a designer in Jakarta or Taipei should be able to find a maker in the region without the relationship routing through Europe first.

What was on show were fragments—designers, makers and manufacturers each represented by a piece of what they do, none of it collaborative yet. Which may sound unsatisfying, but it wasn’t. I was standing in front of various work doing the pairing in my head, which made me feel excited about possibilities. The show was housed in BaleBio, a beautiful regenerative bamboo structure by Cave Urban, and a model of the same building sat in the exhibition at the other end of the site.

That exhibition, Architecture in Scale, curated by design journalist Charmaine Chan, brought together twenty-five models of completed buildings from Indonesia and across Asia—Kengo Kuma & Associates and Andra Matin among them. A lovely thing to move through slowly.

One object I keep thinking about was inside Project Benih. Chang Po-Chieh, who runs Zhēnzhēn Stained Glass Lab in Taiwan, showed two pieces from his Relight series in vintage patterned glass. I wasn’t expecting a Taiwanese designer’s nostalgia to echo mine, but that’s the same glass that was in the door panels of half the houses I knew growing up in Yugoslavia. It moved me more than anything else there.

Material was the strongest thread running through the site. Ceramic tiles, textiles and weaving—tactile traditions taken somewhere new rather than given a respectful nod. Gridwerk’s hand-glazed tiles, on the Kolektif Matter stand, are the example I keep coming back to. A lot of it would go straight into Australian and international projects looking for a point of difference, something with real artisanal quality, and it comes out of a culture of making that Indonesia still has, and we largely don’t.

On the more experimental end, Bell Living Lab, a group of researchers and designers working alongside farmers and artisans, had made leather from coffee. At Wasted by Potato Head, Max Lamb was making caps from off-cut cardboard in front of anyone who stopped.

My favourite thing on the whole site was a chair. Sander Wassink’s V-Series, presented by Method Inc, starts as a handful of aluminium connectors and becomes whatever the place can give it. Three had come from Japan. Two were built at Pengembak from timber salvaged from the venue itself, with Kaltimber, who work with reclaimed Balinese wood. Then visitors made their own across several days, choosing and cutting the timber, helping each other assemble. Same structure underneath every one, but not one of them alike.

The other pattern I kept noticing was ritual. A tea ceremony at the entrance. The Taiwan pavilion. One stand was giving people haircuts, which sounds like a gimmick and wasn’t—it made a small pocket of intimacy in the middle of a commercial event, someone’s hands on your head while you sat still for twenty minutes.

Peter Stutchbury in conversation with Suzy Annetta. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

High tide at the talk stage, designed by Budiman Ong. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

Fiona Lynch, in conversation with Jeremy Smart. Photo: Dana Tomić Hughes.

The talk stage became a performance stage by night. Photo: Indra Wiras.

The talks

Budiman designed the stage himself. A bamboo structure standing in the water, so that depending on the tide the speakers’ feet were in it. Everyone spoke barefoot. The audience sat across the water on tiered scaffolding under umbrellas made of recycled material, and loudspeakers had been run right across the site, so the talks carried well past the seating and reached people who hadn’t come for them. Poetry and chaos. Utterly charming.

Design Anthology curated 360° Design Dialogues, and its editors hosted them; the programme is the theme arriving by a different door. Craft translated into contemporary objects, with Kwangho Lee. Textiles as material research rather than decoration, with Tiffany Loy. The business of design, with Gabriel Tan. Plus solo conversations with Bethan Laura Wood, Tomoyuki Hasegawa, Fiona Lynch and Peter Stutchbury.

Not a list of the loudest names available. A list of people whose work starts in material and place rather than in “style”.

Fiona Lynch spoke with Jeremy Smart about her practice—the fine arts degree underneath it, the intuitive way she works, the painterly and layered material compositions her studio has become known for.

And then Peter Stutchbury closed the event on the last afternoon, in conversation with Suzy Annetta, and the theme stopped being a theme.

He learned to read land at eleven, herding sheep on the family farm, using the natural levels of the ground to move them where he wanted them to go. He has been doing a version of that ever since. Papua taught him an intuitive response to shelter and how to live alongside people unlike himself, which he said is what generates our humanity. The reading of land over 350 million years, and our very small place in it. “Nature is the biggest teacher. It refreshes you. It always gives back,” he said, also quoting his dear friend, Uncle Max Dulumunmun Harrison, Yuin elder: “In order to keep it, you gotta give it away.”

Then he told the story of the jacket, which he had already shared with me on our flight, after I admired him wearing it. The first time he met Issey Miyake, Miyake was wearing the jacket, and Peter called it “the mistake of saying out loud how much I liked it”. He got back to his hotel in Tokyo that afternoon and found it folded on the bed. He’s worn it ever since.

He was saying all of this barefoot with the tide around his ankles, on a stage built to put him exactly there. If you set out to design an ending for an event about making things with the land rather than on top of it, I don’t know that you could do any better.

Indonesian architect Andra Matin was sitting in the audience. He and Peter met once, thirty years ago, at a conference where they both spoke, and hadn’t seen each other since, though they’d followed one another’s work the entire time. They were reunited on a beach in Sanur.

Jia Curated co-founders: Yang Yang Hartono, Rudi Winata and Budiman Ong.

The argument

Budiman is deliberate about who gets in. “It’s not just about whether a partner can build a stand and pay for it,” he told me. “We want them to understand what we’re trying to make.”

That sounds precious right up until you hear the reasoning, which is commercial to the bone. Comfortable people have a better time. People having a better time have better conversations. Better conversations make real connections, and connections are what make business.

It helps that the whole thing is one site you could walk in a day, so you keep running into the same people, and the second and third time you cross paths is where anything actually happens. “One good connection can be enough to justify the cost of being part of Jia Curated,” he said. He meant exhibitors. I’d say it goes for visitors, too.

Nobody tried to sell me anything. I was wearing a press lanyard, so it wasn’t that they didn’t know. Nobody asked what my agenda was, nobody pushed a press kit at me, nobody added me to a mailing list. Anyone who has done Milan knows how strange that is. At first, it was disorienting, and then it was liberating. I relaxed in a way I usually can’t at those events.

Suzy reflected afterwards in her Instagram post that it’s clear when something has been “created with care and generosity, and not primarily for financial gain.” You can feel the difference at forty paces and so can everybody else, which is the part the industry keeps forgetting.

The last night

On the last night, after Peter’s talk, I ended up at one of the stands with Suzy, Peter, Andra Matin, Charmaine Chan, and the three founders. It went on for the better part of an hour and felt more like sitting around a campfire than anything official. At some point somebody said out loud what we were all thinking—how did we all end up here together? The founders eventually left to take photographs and officiate the closing, then came back for babi guling.

That hour is the part I keep returning to. Rudi and Yang Yang had told us the running total—more than 15,000 visitors by the end of Sunday, with the final day still uncounted—up from 12,000 in 2025. Not a small event, but small enough that Budiman, Rudi and Yang Yang know everybody in it, and that the three people who built the thing could sit down on the final night and enjoy it. They were laughing like little kids. Nobody was working the room.

Suzy is the one who told me to come. On the plane, I met Peter. Everything else followed from there.

Which is when I stopped calling it luck. Budiman, Rudi and Yang built this entire thing on the theory that one good connection can justify the cost of turning up, and they’re right. What they can’t plan for is where those connections travel. Mine happened somewhere over the Timor Sea, before I’d even landed.

The team behind Jia Curated 2026, signing off for the year.

[Dana Tomić Hughes attended Jia Curated 2026 as a guest of Jia Curated. No coverage was agreed as a condition of the invitation. Images courtesy of Jia Curated & Yellowtrace. Photography credits as noted.]