Wenzhou In-Situ Project

At the beginning of 2026, Hong Museum will organize a group exhibition related to Wenzhou and its culinary culture. The exhibition receives academic support from te editions and is jointly initiated with Wenzhou-Kean University Library and Nan Shi Zhao.
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This exhibition takes local food culture as its creative subject, exploring the ecological limitations and migration patterns reflected in Wenzhou’s culinary traditions. By focusing on a specific food or ingredient from Wenzhou, the exhibition seeks to engage with broader cultural contexts and translate these themes through contemporary artistic methods.

Wenzhou is known for its mobility, with its people’s presence spanning multiple countries worldwide. Under the influence of global neoliberalism, Wenzhou has fostered the fusion of local and global cultures through international trade. This has resulted in individuals navigating between diaspora and cohesion in search of identity and belonging. As times change, the traditional binary opposition between “Wenzhou” and 番（oversea）” (local vs. foreign) is gradually losing its effectiveness, while new framework of recognition is still taking shape.

The phrase “Zou Gai” (走归) in the Wenzhou dialect means “returning home”, embodying the cultural consensus of Wenzhou people—“leaving one’s hometown, yet always longing for it.” The term reflects the tension between adventure and return. With this in mind, Hong Museum seeks to investigate elements closely tied to Wenzhou from more concrete and diverse perspectives, aiming to respond to the city’s cultural imprint.
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Anthropologist Marvin Harris suggests that “the foods people love tend to offer better cost-effectiveness compared to those they avoid, balancing nutritional and ecological factors.” Everyday dietary habits, therefore, reflect economic values and preservation consideration within ecological constraints. Wenzhou is surrounded by mountains on three sides and faces the sea on one, with its terrain sloping from southwest to northeast in a trapezoidal manner. The combination of hills and plains provides diverse conditions for agriculture, forestry, animal husbandry, and fishing, which in turn has shaped its culinary traditions. Ou cuisine (瓯菜) is characterized by its emphasis on seafood, fresh flavors, and a variety of cooking methods with over 30 distinct techniques. It prioritizes banquest dishes, valuing a harmonious blend of color, aroma, taste, presentation, and tableware.
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Wenzhou’s everyday cuisine also carries strong local characteristics. For instance, a typical “morning meal” (吃天光) might include glutinous rice, clear soup rice noodles, while snacks such as Dengzhan Cake (灯盏糕) and lean meatballs. More than food, these dishes are a comprehensive reflection of social structures, cultural heritage, life wisdom, and historical transformations over time.
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As part of this residency project, researchers can conduct studies based on one or more Wenzhou-related foods, ingredients, or recipes. Alternatively, they can approach the subject through dietary structures, culinary customs, food history, production methods, or consumption settings. By examining food culture, participants will explore changes in the motivation of local production, consumption habits, and social identity dynamics, ultimately producing one or more of the following:
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a) Physical artworks (e.g., installations, videos, two-dimensional art works)
b) Workshops, seminars, participatory interactions, or essays

The outcomes of this residency may be featured in Hong Museum’s 2026 group exhibition or publication. The exact format, location, and schedule will be determined based on specific circumstances.

Since the announcement of the residency program, we have received 91 applications from diverse geographic and disciplinary backgrounds, bringing a wealth of possibilities to the project. Based on a comprehensive evaluation of applicants’ personal backgrounds, artistic practices, and residency proposals, as well as their engagement with food and local culture, we conducted online discussions with selected applicants. After careful consideration and ensuring fair allocation of residency resources, we have selected the following seven groups of creators for the residency program.
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About Artists

Gao Qizhen Tin, born and raised in Wenzhou, based in Berlin. Gao's work powerfully intertwines the tensions of nature and humanity. Various media such as collage, drawing, dyeing, knitting and other assemblages of physical objects, from cooking ingredients to handmade textiles, these fluid cultural symbols, raw and exuberant organic materials are brought to a broader historical and artistic context after thought-through and experimented. The artist's personal narrative resonates with collective memories and offer enlightenment. Reweaves the intricate connection between the Anthropocene and intrinsic materiality, reflecting the subtle dramaturgy that exists in human – object.
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CAI XIAN, the Wenzhou’s way to call fermented and salted vegetables. The project focus on vivid moments that people ignored, combing with dyeing and weaving, expresses the characteristic of the ingredients themselves. Includes the field work in food markets, pickles processing family workshops and enterprise factories in Wenzhou, analysis and draw up a thread of pickling recipe history throughout different generations. Exploring the deep connection between Wenzhou’s local culture and dietary traditions, nod with memories and emotions carried the special fermented vegetables.
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Jiacheng Chen is an artist and independent researcher based in Nanjing, China. He holds Master of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and Bachelor of Arts at the University of Georgia. In 2024, Chen initiated the Lab of Spiritual Territories (lostlost.org). As an artist, his action navigates through the knowledge production system and the Earth that lives inhabit, exploring the complexity of in-situ knowing. His research explores how tradition and heritage can sustainably evolve, especially in the theoretical context of place identity. The trans-disciplinary background drives him to try different forms of creative practice, and his commonly used methods include digital drawing, design narrative, painting, installation, video.

Jiacheng Chen’s Previous research has primarily explored the possibilities of concepts "locality" and "place identity" within design narratives. It has investigated the potential evolution of "place" in different contexts through design proposals and artistic works, reflecting on the renewal of social values during these changes. Specific topics covered include the evolution of regional landscapes, the renewal of traditional rituals, the contemplation of historical relics, and the redefinition of the significance of infrastructure. Utilizing field, archival studies, and qualitative interviews, the cognitive dimensions opened by these research ultimately become a certain "trigger" for the audience through artistic works.

‘The Mountain Breathes Beyond Measure’ launched at the Beiqiu Museum of Contemporary Art in 2024, is a research action based on the tunnel space where the exhibition is held, initiating an embodied study of urban residual spaces. Simultaneously, the project focuses on the the mountain's breath to reflect on the slightly dry modern surveying-drafting techniques, and attempts to re-enchant the place with seven custom-made artworks.
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“The Jelly Theater” is an installation and expanded cinema performance. It aims to create a work produced through creative feedback, involving four artists inspired by research material on Wenzhou cuisine, specifically “Jelly.” Each artist, according to their role, informs and collaborates to materialize their contribution. This production method is led by Zheng Yezhou and facilitated by Chen Zi(study and writing), Camille Casemier (performativity and object composition), Juan Flores(motion and sound), and himself(moving/still image and data).

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1）Zheng Yezhou is a video artist specializing in moving images and video installation art. He explores the transgressive nature of the act of ‘gazing’ and the interaction between the gazer and the gazed-upon, using video and installations to discuss the poetics and proximity between people and their environment, and between the environment and objects. He believes there are no innocent images and reflects on the way they are made. He aims to dissolve the inherent production processes of images and deconstruct them from a methodological standpoint with his experience working with experimental animation and film. He holds a BA in Film Art from Emerson College and an MFA in Film, Video, New Media, and Animation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). His works have been exhibited at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, John David Mooney Foundation in Chicago, Uncanny Gallery in New York, CICA Museum in Seoul, and the FAA Art Action Festival in Mexico City
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2）Jessica Zi Chen (she/her, b. Changzhou, China) is an art history researcher, independent curator, and community builder currently based in Chicago, the homelands of the Odawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi nations. With a focus on the critical symbiosis of human and non-human, Chen integrates her interests in ecocritical theory, Indigenous knowledge, and archipelago thinking in the context of extractive capitalism across Global South into her curatorial and theoretical work. She holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History from SAIC and a BA in History of Art and Architecture and French Studies from Boston University. She is the co-founder of Working Title, an art historian-led initiative that fosters collaboration between scholars and artists through the AAH Conversation series, commissioned projects, and cross-institutional exchanges in and beyondthe Chicago art community. Chen has been a Muña 2024 resident, a Mildred’s Lane resident, and a presenter at the University of Chicago and UIUC.
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3）Juan Eduardo Flores is a Chicago based artist and educator interested in motion, sound, and the "traveling image” as mediums to explore our intimate relationship between control & entropy, along with presence & absence. His practice also has an emphasis in the art of documenting the transformations that happen during the gradual transition from being in point A to point B. Further topics of exploration and interest include: stress-testing minimal to complex systems, automation vs. manual labor, the poetics of the everyday, and the aesthetics of wonder.

He holds a BA in Art with a certificate from the Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology from Connecticut College and an MFA in Art & Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). He currently teaches at SAIC as part time faculty in the department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, & Designed Objects, and in The University of Illinois Chicago, teaching new media art and physical computing.
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4）Camille Casemier began her artistic career studying dance and puppetry. She brings her choreographic sensibilities to a diverse range of materials in her practice, including objects, language, and images. With a keen sensitivity to the "liveness" of things, her projects often evolve from a single object, expanding into networks of gestures that span pages, stages, and screens, frequently mediated by cameras and audiences. Central to her work are themes of collection and the archive, influenced by her day job at a resale shop and her engagement with Chicago’s cultural institutions, such as the Field Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Her recent projects critically explore the intersections of value, cultural artifacts, collecting practices, and the cultural legacy of accumulation. Casemier’s creative trajectory was profoundly shaped by her formative experiences with Bread and Puppet and her studies in dance at The New School. She holds a joint BFA in Art and Theater from the University of Michigan and an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she now teaches in the Painting and Drawing and Performance departments. Her work has been presented at Festival Arte/Acción (Mexico City), the Indonesian Performative Drawing Forum (Yogyakarta), Re-Happening at Black Mountain College, Performance Art Studies #73 (Görlitz, Germany/Zgorzelec, Poland), and the Volkenburg Puppetry Symposium of the Chicago International Puppet Festival, among other venues.
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Sha Shuang is an artist who focuses on social art. She graduated from the Printmaking Department of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, lives and works in Shanghai and Beijing. She majors in public relations, public space and local practice research and artistic discussion. The production methods of her works cover painting, installation and social intervention, and the art project uses "co-creation" as the working method. She has long been concerned with the "standardization", "opposition and flow" in relationships, using this as a research clue, starting from images and events, focusing on displacement, change, memory, and community social issues as keywords.
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「Tagtogo SoRaSi: Cattle Digital Surveillance Art Project」This is a socially participatory art project promoted by the creative production department set up by artist Sha Shuang in a Shanghai animal husbandry health big data company. The project uses cattle as clues to record the relationship about person, people and the environment in urban fringe areas and rural scenes. Through photography, sketches and woodblock prints, the creator and company founder made a map field in the early stage. The issues that the project hopes to focus on include migration, change, memory and community. The project explores the use of surveillance and big data, as well as the compatibility of old and new farming methods - through interdisciplinary art and collaborative participatory methods to promote the development of artistic projects. The artist is going to plan, create and display the project in stages, and will connect multiple sites to form a complete social practice project.
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Review

Wenzhou In-Situ Project Season One Review | Local Foodways and Field Research in Wenzhou

In late 2024, Hong Museum launched the first season of the Wenzhou In-Situ Project (Zougui Project), taking Wenzhou’s local food culture as its central research theme. Scholars, researchers, and practitioners from diverse disciplines—including art, sociology, anthropology, political science, and architecture—were invited to conduct residency-based fieldwork in Wenzhou. Participants included both Wenzhou natives with deep-rooted local knowledge and external observers encountering the city's culture through intensive engagement for the first time. The diversity of identities and perspectives became one of the project's most significant methodological foundations, reflecting the conceptual implications embedded in the term zougui itself.

In the Wenzhou dialect, zougui (走归) literally means “to return home.” The expression embodies a shared cultural sentiment among Wenzhou people: venturing afar while remaining emotionally attached to one's hometown. Like the journey home itself, zou (走, “to leave”) and gui (归, “to return”) exist in a dynamic tension, generating forces that pull in different directions. Exploration and practice beyond home continually intersect with feelings of attachment, contradiction, and longing. Through this process of movement and return, individuals are shaped and refined, ultimately forging deeper connections with the idea of “home.”

For older generations of Wenzhou residents, the world was often divided into two distinct categories: Wenzhou and fan (the outside world)—the local and the foreign. Yet as social conditions have changed, this binary framework has gradually lost its explanatory power, giving way to new ways of understanding place, identity, and belonging.

The practice of the Wenzhou In-Situ Project reflects precisely this transformation. Among more than ninety applications received by Hong Museum, approximately thirty percent of applicants had some form of connection to Wenzhou, and half of these were overseas Wenzhou natives who had lived abroad for extended periods. At the same time, many others were drawn by the project's concept itself and entered Wenzhou through their own research interests. As a result, the project moves beyond the conventional notion of “returning to one's roots,” becoming a platform that connects local and external perspectives, hometown and elsewhere. Wenzhou is no longer understood solely as an identity grounded in ancestry, household registration, or geographic origin, but as a place-based relationship that can be collectively experienced, continuously negotiated, and actively constructed.

From late 2024 to the summer of 2026, seven research projects developed through the initiative have been presented to the public through workshops, public programs, artworks, and exhibitions. Looking back at the first season, it becomes clear that the researchers were not merely concerned with food itself. Rather, food served as a medium through which to understand how local experience is produced and sustained in Wenzhou: how food maintains transnational communities, preserves ecological memory, carries the labor of family life, and continually shapes collective understandings of what “Wenzhou” means through ongoing processes of mobility, migration, and exchange.
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Throughout the first season of the Wenzhou In-Situ Project, seven research teams focused on different foods and food-related phenomena, offering diverse perspectives on the complexity and plurality of Wenzhou's local culture.
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Cleanliness, Standards, and Boundaries: Food Transformation in Modernization

Research centered on dairy products, conducted by Sha Shuang, used the local dairy company Yiming Group as an entry point to examine how modern industrial systems reshape relationships between humans and animals, production and consumption. From digitalized factories to large-scale dairy farms, she observed that milk becomes almost entirely invisible within contemporary industrial processes. Once milk leaves the cow's body, it immediately enters pipelines, storage tanks, and transportation networks, becoming integrated into a vast industrial system. This separation and standardization reflect modern food industry's pursuit of cleanliness, safety, and efficiency, while also encouraging people to understand milk primarily through indicators such as yield, nutrition, and technological control.

In contrast, artisanal cheesemaking practices continue to exist in rural areas, supported by close connections between producers and local vegetarian networks. Here, production and consumption rely more heavily on localized food knowledge and accumulated practical experience than on standardized market mechanisms. The research also traced Wenzhou's historical role as the birthplace of China's private condensed milk industry. Together, these materials reveal the transformation of dairy products from local experience into modern commodities.
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A parallel but contrasting perspective emerged from research on blood clams. Focusing on questions of boundaries and contamination, Wu Jingran examined the entire lifecycle of blood clam production—from hatcheries and aquaculture to consumption and online circulation—to investigate how modern technologies reshape relationships between humans and marine life. From traditional tidal-flat cultivation to contemporary purification-based aquaculture, modern systems continuously redefine the production and consumption of blood clams through sanitation technologies, food safety standards, and hygiene regulations, attempting to transform them into a “modern food” compatible with contemporary notions of cleanliness and safety.

Yet blood clams resist complete incorporation into such frameworks. Their vivid red juices, methods of consumption that blur the line between raw and cooked, and local beliefs such as “eating blood replenishes blood” all contribute to their ambiguous status within modern dietary regimes.

From traditional cold dishes served at local banquets to their reputation online as a form of “Wenzhou dark cuisine,” blood clams continue to move between categories of purity and impurity, local tradition and modern regulation. The identities, controversies, and imaginaries surrounding them suggest that modernization does not simply eliminate ambiguity and locality from food. Rather, it continuously reconstructs understandings of food, bodies, and cultural boundaries through new technologies and regulatory frameworks.

Together, the two cases illustrate different trajectories through which modernization operates upon food. Milk becomes a stable and controllable modern commodity through standardization and industrialization, while blood clams continue to expose the ambiguities and contestations that resist complete rationalization. Both demonstrate that modernization is not merely a process of technological advancement but also one that continually redefines food values, consumption practices, and cultural understandings.
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Banquets, Fermentation, and Transnational Circulation: Food in Globalization

The research collective Fan Fan Zhi Bei (“The Food Folk”) focused on rural banquet culture in Wenzhou while extending its investigation to transnational migration networks linking Wenzhou and Europe over several decades. From Dragon Boat Festival banquets and dragon boat celebrations to the consumption practices of returning overseas Chinese, food functions not only as a repository of local memory but also as a crucial medium for sustaining transnational communities.

Whether in the form of wine and chocolate brought back from Italy or locally sourced seafood and dried fish carried abroad despite customs risks, food continuously circulates between homeland and diaspora, reaffirming people's sense of belonging.

The research also addressed topics including second-generation migrant identities, women's distinctive relationships to local foods, and the effects of river management and ecological transformation on local social relations. Together, these investigations portray a Wenzhou society that remains in constant motion and reconfiguration under globalization.
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Complementing these studies of migration and mobility, Gao Qizhen's research on pickled mustard greens examined how local foods circulate among households, markets, and global supply chains. Using the everyday practice of vegetable fermentation as a point of departure, the study explored relationships among domestic labor, intergenerational transmission, and global markets.

Once an essential reserve food against hunger and hardship, pickled vegetables carry collective memories of seasonality, time, and survival. Variations in household recipes, divisions of labor, and even the microbial communities carried by individual makers significantly shape their final flavors. Yet with the spread of modern nutritional discourses, these high-salt fermented foods have increasingly become marginalized.

At the same time, regional products such as meigancai (dried preserved mustard greens) have been repackaged, standardized, and exported to countries including Portugal, the United States, and Spain, entering global food supply chains. In this process, local foods are transformed from household staples into transnational commodities. Drawing an analogy between fermentation and knitting, the researcher reexamined forms of knowledge, bodily experience, and labor that remain embedded within domestic spaces but are often overlooked in narratives of modernization.

Whether through transnational banquet cultures or local foods entering global markets, both projects reveal that food is never a static object. Rather, it is a dynamic medium through which local identities, social relations, and economic values are continually reshaped.
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The Aspic Collective took the traditional snack Yanyi Aspic, a regional delicacy with a history of more than six centuries and recognized as intangible cultural heritage, as a starting point for examining the changing relationship between Shuitan Village and the sea. Through oral histories, fieldwork, archival research, and remote participation by overseas team members, the project retraced the transformation of this former fishing village from one that “lived by the sea” to one that now exists at a distance from it.

As coastal resources became depleted and land reclamation projects altered the shoreline, local residents gradually lost not only their ability to make a living from the sea but also their collective memory of it. Where the sea was once visible from Wanghai Bridge, today only land and aquaculture ponds remain. Younger generations have become increasingly unfamiliar with fishing, harvesting marine algae, and maritime training practices. The growing distance between people and the sea is reflected not only in physical geography but also in ruptures of generational knowledge and local understanding.

As a food derived from marine resources, Yanyi Aspic serves as a vital medium connecting people and the sea, past and present. It preserves memories of former modes of production and everyday life while simultaneously bearing witness to the transformation and reconstruction of local culture under modernization. By tracing the history of this food, the research reactivates fading maritime memories and raises broader questions about how local societies sustain historical experience and cultural identity amid profound ecological and economic change.
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Rooting, Migration, and Transformation: Food Practices in the Making of Locality

Research on turnips and sweet potatoes extended the discussion toward a broader historical question central to Wenzhou: how locality itself comes into being.

Chen Jiacheng's project focused on pancai, a local variety of turnip, situating it within a conceptual framework that moves beyond botanical classification. Unlike the rhizome metaphor frequently invoked in contemporary art and cultural theory, the tuber represented by pancai possesses qualities of storage and rootedness. It grows downward, accumulates nutrients, and develops slowly but steadily. These botanical characteristics offer a compelling lens through which to understand Wenzhou society. Despite long histories of migration and transregional mobility, Wenzhou people have maintained strong attachments to their place of origin and enduring traditions of communal settlement. Through kinship networks, commercial ties, and return-home practices, dispersed individuals are continually reconnected. The logic of accumulation and rootedness embodied by pancai mirrors the resilience of local culture itself.

In contrast, the story of the sweet potato highlights another pathway through which locality is produced. As an introduced crop, its Chinese name carries the character fan (“foreign”), explicitly marking its external origins. Yet through long processes of circulation, adaptation, and settlement, the sweet potato became integrated into local food systems, serving as a crucial staple for ordinary people and becoming foundational to the functioning of local society.

The collective Plant Nanmen Cooperative explored sweet potatoes through historical, culinary, and artistic perspectives, investigating how the crop became localized and embedded in Wenzhou's collective memory. Archival research shows that after arriving in China through maritime trade, sweet potatoes gradually became an important supplement to rice cultivation in Wenzhou's mountainous landscape because of their high yields and resilience to drought and poor soils. In doing so, they profoundly influenced regional food systems, migration patterns, and mountain livelihoods.

Food traditions centered on sweet potatoes—including sweet potato cakes, sweet potato starch products, and sweet potato spirits—not only preserve memories of survival during particular historical periods but also constitute a distinctive “sweet potato heritage” unique to Wenzhou.

Drawing on artistic examples from China and abroad, the project further demonstrates that food is not merely an object of consumption but also a cultural medium connecting land, bodies, memory, and spiritual life. By reexamining this seemingly ordinary crop, the research addresses how the foreign becomes local and invites renewed attention to regional history, everyday labor, and marginalized memories.

Taken together, the studies of pancai and sweet potatoes suggest that locality is neither a natural condition nor a tradition simply handed down unchanged. It is an ongoing process of becoming. It involves both rooted accumulation and the absorption, transformation, and renaming of external influences. Food serves as one of the most tangible and everyday expressions of this process: the flavors people identify as “the taste of home” record not only life on the land but also histories of migration, trade, and cultural exchange.
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Beyond field research and artistic production, workshops formed a crucial component of the Wenzhou In-Situ Project. They served as public extensions of the research themes and opened spaces for broader participation. During its first season, the project organized more than ten workshops, attracting approximately 320 participants.

Centered on themes such as dairy products, blood clams, family banquets, aspic, and pickled vegetables, researchers developed diverse workshop formats and public sharing sessions. In dairy-focused workshops, participants sampled locally produced dairy products made through different methods while sharing childhood photographs and taste memories, connecting personal experiences with the development of Wenzhou's dairy industry. Discussions expanded to breastfeeding, motherhood, and caregiving relationships, with participants using everyday objects such as kitchen knives and family photographs to narrate bodily experiences and life histories as mothers, daughters, and caregivers. Milk thus became more than a food—it emerged as a cultural medium linking bodies, emotions, and social structures.

In blood clam workshops, participants cooked and tasted blood clams together while discussing differences in taste, food taboos, and regional identities. The Aspic Collective invited participants to bring personally meaningful objects and collaboratively construct an imagined island carrying memories and emotional associations with the sea through collage and spatial installations. Meanwhile, the project Open Kitchen: Returning to the Banquet led participants into local markets to purchase ingredients and recreate dishes from remembered family banquets. Through collective cooking and dining, stories of migration, homecoming, and family memory were exchanged, transforming private experiences once confined to kitchens, market stalls, and embodied memory into topics of public discussion.

Through making, tasting, discussing, writing, and exchanging experiences, these workshops enabled participants to enter directly into the questions explored by researchers. Food ceased to be merely an object of observation and became a medium connecting people across generations, professions, and life experiences.

In this sense, workshops functioned not simply as channels for disseminating research outcomes but as open social spaces for collective inquiry. Researchers and participants jointly contributed to the production and discussion of knowledge, allowing local experiences to be continually supplemented, revised, and activated through dialogue. Food memories previously embedded in households, communities, and individual lives thereby acquired new forms of public significance.
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Initiated by Hong Museum, with academic support from te editions and collaboration from Wenzhou-Kean University Library and Nanshizhao, the first season of the Wenzhou In-Situ Project used local food culture as a point of entry to explore relationships among people, land, ecology, migration, and memory. Several of the resulting research and artistic projects have since been incorporated into Hong Museum's exhibition Selective Appetite.

The second season of the Wenzhou In-Situ Project, soon to be launched, will shift its focus from food—the medium closest to the body—to the body itself. Centered on traditional Chinese medicine and therapeutic massage practices native to Wenzhou, the project will investigate how local medical knowledge is generated and circulated through environments, experiences of illness, folk beliefs, labor practices, and transnational migration.

From the development of the Yongjia medical tradition to modern experiments in integrating Chinese and Western medicine; from folk bone-setting and massage techniques to the establishment of Chinese medicine clinics across Europe by Wenzhou migrants, local medical practice represents not merely a healthcare system but also an important pathway for understanding place-based knowledge, embodied experience, and social relations.

Building on residency-based research, the second season will continue to employ fieldwork, public programs, exhibitions, and publications to explore how Wenzhou understands the body, responds to illness, and carries these experiences into wider global contexts through migration and mobility.

From food to the body, from sensory experience to medical knowledge, the Wenzhou In-Situ Project will continue to use locality as its field of inquiry, seeking new perspectives between everyday life and cultural practice. It will continue to ask: when we speak of a city, beyond what it produces or trades, can we also understand how it conceives of the body—and how it cares for itself?
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Wenzhou In-Situ Project

2025.03 - 2025.08

About Residency Program

About Artists

Review