Wil Aballe laughs as he recounts finding his way into the role of gallerist and independent curator. Talking with the Georgia Straight at a South Granville café, he describes the first time he participated as a dealer in a major art fair, a mere five months after opening his own exhibition space in Vancouver.

“The fair was so expensive and I wanted all these young artists to have the opportunity to show in front of that audience—as many artists as I possibly could,” he says, admitting that he took the work of 20 artists with him. “I hung what positively could be referred to as a cabinet of curiosities—and negatively could be called overhung.” Then he adds, “It was like packing for a trip and not knowing what to take, so throwing everything in your suitcase.”

Born in the Philippines, Aballe moved to Toronto with his family when he was 10 and experienced the immigrant child’s parental pressure to become a professional. Before, during, and after acquiring an engineering degree at the University of Waterloo, he explored the creative possibilities of music, theatre, and industrial design, but decided he didn’t have the natural talent to pursue any of them full-time. It wasn’t until he moved to Vancouver in 2005, to take a job as a process engineer, that he immersed himself in the visual arts, initially as a viewer, then as a modest collector. “I didn’t really consider myself a collector, but everybody else did,” he says. “It took me a while to figure out what I was doing with acquiring works.…It was a very fraught process.”

Fraught or not, Aballe proved himself a quick and thoughtful student of local, national, and international art and artists. In 2012, after being invited to curate three shows at a pop-up gallery in Yaletown, he launched Wil Aballe Art Projects (WAAP) in his small, one-room apartment in Mount Pleasant. Almost immediately, WAAP generated media buzz and art-world attention—and attracted hundreds of people to its openings. “It was a bit of a shock to me that it worked out as well as it did,” he says. Still, he adds, “It was something that I took seriously from the beginning.”

Aballe conceived WAAP as a way of providing space for artists to show challenging and often experimental work. He also enjoyed demonstrating that such work was compatible with a domestic space. After a couple of years of exhibitions in his apartment, however, he felt he had fulfilled his early aspiration, and moved WAAP to a big, raw, semi-industrial space on Frances Street, near Clark Drive. In the meantime, he has hung on to his engineering day job, and continues to take guest-curating gigs for other galleries.

Recently, he relocated to a basement gallery in a heritage building in Strathcona, sharing rent and access with the main-floor Fazakas Gallery, directed by LaTiesha Fazakas and specializing in Northwest Coast First Nations art. “It’s smart to partner with other arts organizations in a city like Vancouver,” Aballe says. “We can double our audience through our adjacency. Also, we both felt very strongly that it’s important to build a dialogue where traditional Native art and contemporary art are side by side.”

Up next for WAAP are two solo shows by young artists, Vanessa Brown (opening Thursday [September 15]) and Matthew Shields (opening mid-November). Despite his commitment to emerging Vancouver artists and marginal spaces, Aballe is feeling the pressure to build a bigger and more international program.

“It’s challenging because there isn’t really a formula—how to run a very local program that also participates in an international dialogue.” For the time being, he will continue to run WAAP and take part in art fairs, he says, acknowledging with another laugh that he now knows better than to stuff the work of 20 artists into one metaphoric suitcase.