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.