How Chinese artist Alice Chen gave Shanghai creatives hope during the city’s turbulent Covid years

Alice Chen’s ‘Terrace Project’ hosted works and performances by locally based artists at a time when Shanghai’s art scene was in desperate need of positivity

The city’s Power Station of Art museum hosted an exhibition of the project in September; Chen, meanwhile, plans to relocate to France once again

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Chinese artist and curator Alice Chen set up “Project Terrace” at her home in the French consul general’s residence in Shanghai, which ran from 2020 to earlier this year. Photo: Alice Chen

Published: 11:15am, 13 Oct 2022Updated: 10:53pm, 14 Oct 2022

In 2005, the then 30-year-old artist Chen Lingyang made an artwork called Fill in the Blanks – two pieces of paper, one bright red, which included the words: “Chen Lingyang was married as of December 31st, 2004. Chen Lingyang will retire from the arts world.”

For years, she kept her word. The artist best known for Twelve Flower Months (1999-2000) – a delicate photographic documentation of her own menstruation, now in the collection of the M+ museum in Hong Kong – left China in 2005 with her French diplomat husband and stopped exhibiting.

Later, she explained that the identity of being an artist was not always liberating, creatively. Life as a diplomatic wife presented a new sort of adventure.

But that all changed in 2020 when she and her family returned to China. With her husband, Benoît Guidée, appointed the French consul general in Shanghai, she established the Positive Art Research Centre within the consul’s historic official residence as a haven for artists during pandemic lockdowns, and plunged into the local cultural community once again.

An event called “DeYi Studio: Inside the Magic Circle”, created by artist duo Xia Yilan and Paul Devautour, held on the terrace of the French consul general’s residence in Shanghai in October 2021. Photo: Alice Chen

Chen was born in Yiwu, a city in Zhejiang province near Shanghai that claims to have China’s largest wholesale market of small commodities.

She left aged 16, in 1991, for Hangzhou, the capital of the province, to study art at the high school affiliated with what is now named the China Academy of Art.