Group Exhibition: Origins of Artist Residencies in China: Another Pathway to Contemporary Chinese Art

Curators: Hu Chao (胡超) and Brian Wallace

Developed from research independently conducted by art historian Hu Chao, this exhibition examines how artist residencies helped shape contemporary Chinese art from the early 1990s. Artworks, archives and artists’ accounts trace the institutions, hosts and networks that made cross-border artistic life possible.

The research asks what artists learned through living and making work in unfamiliar environments. Encounters with materials, routines and communities generated embodied knowledge that exhibitions and publications alone could not provide. These experiences reshaped artistic methods and continued to circulate through works, friendships, exhibitions and teaching.

The Chinese title is 借壳——驻留计划溯源与中国当代艺术进程; Jie Ke means “Borrowing the Shell”. The shell is an institution, city or network whose resources artists and organisers adapt to new purposes. This history follows mutual exchange and local transformation, rather than a simple transfer of an overseas model.

Three overlapping phases organise the exhibition. Transplantation traces early exchanges through Australia’s Asialink, supported locally by Red Gate Gallery. Grafting examines how Red Gate Residency in Beijing and the Chinese European Art Center in Xiamen developed locally rooted programmes from 2001. Mycelium follows wider networks, including China Residencies, Shangyuan Art Museum and Zheng Xuewu’s Hudson Art Center. A companion database documents active residency programmes in mainland China.

Hu Chao is a Research Associate Professor at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. His institutional research examines how museums, galleries and memorial institutions shape identity, memory and cultural relations. This includes studies of Korean cultural institutions and overseas museum collaborations, and his monograph Constructing National Identity: National Museums and Galleries of Singapore, 1965–2015 (published in Chinese by Guangxi Normal University Press). His exhibition Bali Island: Art and the World Beyond the Rainforest (2026, Guangzhou) examined artistic travel across China, Southeast Asia and other regions.

Research, catalogue and artist list:
https://www.huchaocurator.com/exhibitions/borrowing-the-shell/

Installation view, Red Gate Gallery, Beijing, 2026. Photo: Zhang Guozhong. Courtesy of Hu Chao.