Around 2009, Crystal Ruth Bell and Kira Simon-Kennedy, who met while working around the Red Gate Residency, began systematically surveying this scattered field. In 2013 they founded China Residencies, a non-profit information platform: a bilingual website cataloguing the country's programs and institutions, and an annual report (2014–2021) that documented the field year by year and remains its most extensive public record. The scattered nodes were drawn, at last, into one open map. China Residencies hosts no residents of its own and receives no artists — what it does is the connecting itself.
This network appeared, in part, because these were the years when residency programs multiplied fastest in China. Three Shadows Photography Art Centre's international residency (2008); A4 International Residency Art Center in Chengdu (2011); the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai (2011); the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute's residency for young artists (from 2012); Dimensions Art Center in Chongqing (2013); Chronus Art Center (2013) — museums, academies, a commercial brand, independent spaces: each a node.
Local forces were building on their own account. The poet Cheng Xiaobei, with more than twenty poets and artists, initiated Shangyuan Art Museum in 2000; run by volunteers, it opened to international residents in 2007 and later extended to Hainan, Huangshan and Jingdezhen. The artist Zheng Xuewu, supported early on by Red Gate among others, took up residencies in the United States, co-founded a program in Beijing in 2006, and around 2018–2019 founded the Hudson Art Center in New York, with residencies designed for Chinese artists — passing the borrowed shell, in turn, to the next ones setting out.
After nearly three decades of running residencies, Asialink shifted its focus to institution-to-institution partnerships in 2020. Programs emerge, transform, disappear, or continue in new forms — that is how the mycelium grows: no single center, spreading across platforms, institutions, artists and regions.
What this exhibition presents are only some of the nodes in that network. We salute every institution, organizer and artist who has pushed residencies forward; more programs, archives and historical threads can be found in the exhibition catalogue.
