There used to be just one reason for visiting a grotty factory building called the Remex Centre in Hong Kong’s Wong Chuk Hang district: picking up your orders at a no-frills meat and fish wholesaler with a constant background noise of meat slicers and the unmistakable smell of frozen carcasses. And then in 2012, Spring Workshop moved into the third floor, and the Remex Centre became a favourite haven for the arts community.

For the past five years, Mimi Brown’s non-profit art organisation has provided the visual arts equivalent to a hacker space. About 200 local and international artists, curators, musicians and occasionally farmers and writers, have been to the 14,500 sq ft space to meet, collaborate, or simply hang out. There are studios, exhibition spaces, a vast outdoor terrace and excellent coffee. Schoolteachers take their classes to visit, and young people who have never been to an art space before make this a weekend destination.

Recent projects that attest to Spring Workshop’s eclectic nature – and won it the 2016 Prudential Eye Award for best Asian contemporary art organisation – include “Des hôtes: a foreigner, a human, an unexpected visitor”, a three-month series of exhibitions,“chocolate readings” and hypnosis sessions; HK Farm’s one-year residency that saw the urban farming activists leading workshops and creating a farmer’s almanac with artists and writers; and Wu Tsang’s “Duilian”, a multimedia, queer reimagination of the life of Chinese revolutionary heroine Qiu Jin that was completed during two three-month residencies at Spring Workshop.

Brown bought the huge space and installed a dedicated team, now led by director/ curator Christina Li, to encourage the “cross-pollination” of ideas from a “cross-discipline, cross-nation” approach, she says.

“It is my way of being engaged, of collaborating and staying creative. Spring really is my monster art work,” says the California native, who worked as a composer in New York before moving to Hong Kong in 2005 with her Turkish husband.

And now the project is in its last year. Brown decided from the outset that Spring Workshop would only last five years, partly because she knew it would be an all-consuming commitment and, also, a deadline was necessary to give the project impetus and focus, she says.

This year will be all about her first love – music. The Hong Kong New Music Ensemble has moved in for a one-year residency and Ari Benjamin Meyers, a musician from New York, will be here to work on a project called Kunsthalle for Music that Spring Workshop and the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam have co-founded.

The objective, as always, is to blur boundaries. “I’m a music person and when I first came to Hong Kong, I discovered that the music and art scenes are very distinct,” she says.

Kunsthalle for Music will feature collaborations between musicians and visual art practitioners that bring two normally exclusive worlds together, she adds.