借壳
驻留计划溯源与中国当代艺术进程
胡超

“借壳”在中文里有多重意味：既让人想到资本市场中的借壳上市，也让人想到生物的寄居、适应与生长。

艺术家驻留是一种现代“舶来”模式。20世纪90年代，这一模式通过国际合作在中国起步，让中外艺术家有机会在异地住下来、做作品，并持续影响着一代代艺术家的成长。为什么这段实践在中国当代艺术史的书写中长期缺少充分讨论？

艺术驻留不只是国际交流活动，也是中国当代艺术形成过程中的一种实践机制。艺术家在异地生活与创作，获得仅凭观看展览、阅读出版物和接触媒体图像难以获得的具身知识（embodied knowledge），并重新理解自身的位置、创作方法以及与世界的关系。这些经验与思考又通过同行交流、展览、讨论和讲学，传递给更多中国艺术家，帮助他们理解并参与20世纪90年代以来的全球化进程。

20世纪80年代，中外当代艺术家的跨国往来逐渐增多。当时虽有出访和旅居，围绕“住下来创作”的持续支持机制仍不普遍。艺术家驻留为这些跨国交流提供了更稳定的组织支持。本展览梳理艺术驻留在中国的起源，考察它如何参与中国当代艺术的形成与发展：

移植
1990年代至2000年代初：艺术驻留机制进入中国。

1991年，澳大利亚 Asialink 开始协调本国艺术家赴华驻留；同年成立的红门画廊（Red Gate Gallery）作为本地画廊提供协助。这些持续开展的驻留实践，为中外艺术家的跨国交流提供了新的组织形式。

嫁接
2001年以后：艺术驻留机制在地方文化与本土实践中转化。

2001年，红门画廊创办自己的北京驻留计划，早期延续与澳大利亚机构的合作；厦门中国欧洲艺术中心（CEAC）也于同年启动驻留项目，一面与欧洲艺术界保持密切联系，一面扎根中国东南的地方经验、社会资源和艺术生态。

菌丝网络
2009年至今：艺术驻留进入网络化发展的新阶段。

通过 2013年成立的China Residencies平台，国内驻留计划开始加入世界驻留项目的开放网络，并在不同机构、艺术家和地域之间持续生长。中国艺术家自身的需求，也推动了上苑艺术馆、郑学武的哈德逊艺术中心等本土艺术家自建项目的创新。

梳理中国艺术驻留的起源，为中国当代艺术史补上一条线索，也让我们从另一个角度认识中国当代艺术的形成。艺术家在跨地区、跨国的移动与停留中积累的切身经验，同样构成了这一过程的重要部分。


Origins of Artist Residencies in China
Another Pathway to Contemporary Chinese Art
Hu Chao

"Borrowing the Shell," the literal translation of the Chinese title, carries multiple meanings. In finance, it refers to a backdoor listing: entering an existing structure, “borrowing” its resources and connections to get where one could not otherwise go. It also evokes the biological processes of inhabitation, adaptation and regeneration. In both senses the shell is ready-made — an institution, a city, a web of relations — and whoever borrows it emerges changed.

This exhibition uses the metaphor to trace the origins of artist residency programs (or Artist-in-Residence / AiR) in China and raises a question: why has a practice that broadened Chinese artists’ hard-won international experience — especially in the early years of China’s opening-up — remained an overlooked thread in the history of contemporary Chinese art?

Artist residency is more than an international exchange activity at the margins of contemporary Chinese art; it is one of the mechanisms by which that art took shape. Through movement, temporary stays and life across cultures, artists enter unfamiliar environments and gain a kind of knowledge that exhibitions, publications and images alone cannot give — knowledge that changes how they understand their position, their methods, and their relationship to the world. Such experience traveled onward, through exchanges, exhibitions, discussions and teaching, bringing ever more Chinese artists into the globalizing art world.

Chinese artists began going abroad, and foreign artists began arriving in China, in the 1980s — but the exchange was scattered and personal, with no mechanism for organizing a stay long enough to make work. Artist residency became one of the chief organised channels for these exchanges. Since the early 1990s, artist residencies have developed alongside contemporary Chinese art. Their history is not simply a story of external influence and local acceptance, but a process of adaptation, transformation and mutual exchange among artists, institutions and different cultural environments. This exhibition examines how artist residencies helped shape contemporary Chinese art, tracing their development through three stages:

Transplantation
1990s–early 2000s: the residency model enters China

In the early 1990s, Australia’s Asialink began sending artists to China on residencies. Red Gate Gallery, founded in 1991 by Australian Brian Wallace, helped these artists find accommodation and studio space and connect with Beijing’s art community. This organised form of artist mobility helped residencies take root in China’s emerging contemporary art ecosystem.

Grafting
From 2001 onward: residencies take new forms in local contexts

In 2001, Red Gate Gallery launched its own residency program in Beijing, building on a decade of cooperation with its Australian partners. The same year, the Chinese European Art Center (CEAC) started its program in Xiamen, drawing on its European connections. These early local programs put down deep roots — in local cultures, social resources and artistic communities — and developed forms of residency shaped by the Chinese context.

Mycelium
Since 2009: residencies grow into an open network

In 2013, China Residencies launched its bilingual website and went on to publish annual reports from 2014 to 2021, using both to connect residency programs, institutions and artists across China and the world.

In the meantime, the needs of Chinese artists themselves have driven homegrown experiments: Shangyuan Art Museum, now running multiple sites, and Zheng Xuewu's Hudson Art Center in the United States.

Tracing these origins adds a missing thread to the history of contemporary Chinese art and offers another way of understanding how it all came to be. The movement, the stays, the border crossings — carried in artists' own bodies — shaped contemporary Chinese art as much as any exhibition or manifesto.