Rethinking Contemporary Chinese Art through Artist Residencies

Hu Chao

2026

For decades, histories of contemporary Chinese art have often been told through movements, major exhibitions, biennials, the market, and the moments when artists entered international systems. While preparing Origins of Artist Residencies in China: Another Pathway to Contemporary Chinese Art, I became increasingly interested in another question: beyond the exhibitions and events that have already entered art history, how did artists actually come to know the world?

From the 1980s onward, Chinese artists travelled abroad in growing numbers, while foreign artists increasingly came to China. At first, these exchanges were often personal and scattered: visits, sojourns, exhibitions. By the 1990s, artist residencies began to provide a more organised structure. Artists did not simply visit another place; they stayed for weeks, months, sometimes longer, entering another rhythm of daily life, social relations and artistic work.

The value of residencies to artists does not need to be proven by this exhibition. What interests me is a different question: if such experiences shaped the knowledge, methods and international connections of several generations of artists, why have artist residencies so rarely been discussed as a distinct thread in the history of contemporary Chinese art?

With this question in mind, I began tracing and comparing hundreds of residency programmes in China and abroad, together with international exchange projects, institutional archives and artists’ own experiences. Once these dispersed materials were placed alongside one another, a developmental trajectory gradually became visible.

The framework proposed in this exhibition — Transplantation, Grafting and Mycelium — is not an established classification in art history. It is a working framework that I have drawn from this body of research.

Transplantation asks how a new form of artistic exchange entered China. In the 1990s, cooperation between Australia’s Asialink and Red Gate Gallery enabled Chinese and international artists to move in both directions through organised residency programmes.

Grafting asks what happened after that model arrived. Around 2001, Red Gate established its own long-term residency programme. In Xiamen, CEAC maintained close links with Europe while working through the local cultures, workshops, universities and social resources of southeast China. Residency was no longer simply an imported international model; it began to take forms shaped by particular local conditions.

Mycelium describes the more dispersed developments since around 2009. Platforms such as China Residencies connected programmes that had previously been scattered across the country. At the same time, museums, academies, independent spaces, commercial organisations and artists themselves established residency programmes that appeared, changed, ended, and sometimes continued in new forms.

These three perspectives also reveal different directions in China’s artistic engagement with the world: the early importance of Australia, CEAC’s connections with Europe, and later exchanges with the United States and wider global networks. Yet Australia, Europe and the United States are only three lenses used in this exhibition; they are not a complete map of China’s international artistic exchanges.

Looking closely at the history, the relationship between Chinese art and the world was far broader, more reciprocal and more polycentric than a simple story of “Western influence on China.” Exchanges within Asia, and between China and many other regions, remain to be traced in greater depth.

Origins of Artist Residencies in China is therefore neither a complete history of residencies in China nor an attempt to impose a fixed classification on them. It is an effort to recover a line of inquiry from a large and scattered body of material: to move residency from a single line in an artist’s CV back into the history of contemporary Chinese art, and to ask what different art history might become visible as a result.

Domestic and International: Knowing Oneself through Elsewhere

Residency, of course, does not necessarily mean crossing a national border.

China is geographically vast. Different regions contain distinct social experiences, local cultures and ways of life, enough in themselves to offer artists unfamiliar and enriching encounters. From Beijing to Xiamen, from cities to the countryside, from academies and independent spaces to artist-run programmes, movement within China can also enrich different artistic minds. Domestic and international residencies are intertwined, and together they form an important part of contemporary Chinese art that deserves renewed attention.

Chen Wenling, an artist in this exhibition, offers one example. In 2004, then based in Xiamen, he came to Beijing through the Red Gate Residency. Looking back on the very different living and artistic environment of Feijiacun, he recalled:

“The depth of Beijing is like its haze and sandstorms — you can never see to the bottom. This city may not nurture the body as Xiamen does, but it nurtures dreams.”

A residency within China could likewise take an artist beyond a familiar radius of life and into another city’s social experience, artistic circles and intellectual environment.

Chen Wenling is only one example. At the end of the exhibition catalogue, and on the Red Gate Gallery website, we have also assembled a list of artist residency programmes across China. It is not complete, nor is it intended as an authoritative directory. Some programmes have ended, some continue, and new ones keep appearing. The list is better understood as a historical cross-section: a partial record of a constantly changing residency landscape in China.

In 1985, Robert Rauschenberg’s exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing had a powerful impact on many Chinese artists. In the years that followed, Chinese artists moved rapidly towards a wider engagement with the world. Exhibitions, visits, study abroad, residencies and many forms of international collaboration opened windows in different directions.

Artist residency offers a more modest reminder as well. Knowing the world is not only a matter of seeing more artworks or taking part in more exhibitions. It can mean staying in an unfamiliar place, entering its everyday life, living among different people, and reconsidering one’s own position within another cultural and social environment. That unfamiliar place may be overseas, but it may also be another city or another rural region within China.

To know another country or another place in depth does not mean abandoning oneself. Distance can, on the contrary, make the self more visible.

In this sense, “borrowing the shell” is ultimately not about borrowing another identity, but about using another environment to understand oneself anew. The world keeps changing; what an artist may be able to keep is the courage to enter unfamiliar places, and an open mind still willing to understand others.