RAINY GU — IN RESIDENCE September 2026
Recent Exhibition
A residency takes shape through what happens within it — works in progress, conversations, encounters, and exhibitions.
Discover recent exhibitions and moments from artists at Montmartre Residency.
Artists in MR
Montmartre Residency
A growing community of artists, writers and curators who have lived, worked and exhibited through Montmartre Residency
Rainy Gu
2026.09 – 2026.10 · Singapore / China
Visual Artist · Painting
Born in Chongqing, China and currently based in Singapore, Rainy Gu Xia is a visual artist whose ongoing project Field Traces explores how the body registers social structures, spatial constraints, and psychological tension. Moving away from conventional portraiture, her paintings bring bodies, architecture, furniture, and surrounding environments into shared psychological fields through compressed spaces, translucent layers, restless lines, and overlapping forms. Through processes of layering, scraping, and reconstruction, Gu Xia approaches the body not as a passive site of constraint, but as a space of endurance, resistance, and renewed visual agency.
Grace Gu (Gu Guangcan)
2026.09 – 2026.10 · Chongqing
China Writer · Poet · Scholar
Grace Gu (Gu Guangcan, pen name Gu Xiaowei) is a writer, poet and scholar whose practice moves between literature, human geography, field research and the study of place. Born in a small market town along the Jialing River in Chongqing, she later received her doctorate from Chiba University in Japan. Through years of fieldwork, diaries, photography, drawing and writing, place has gradually become central to her literary practice—not merely as the setting of a story, but as a living field in which memory, body, emotion, myth and destiny emerge together. Her writing moves between rural reality and mythic imagination, exploring the relationships between people and land, home and distance, memory and transformation.
Young Joo Lee
2026 upcoming
South Korean artist based in Paris.
Young Joo Lee
2026.08 · Paris, France
Invited Artist · Multidisciplinary Artist
Young Joo Lee is a South Korean-born artist based in Paris. Shaped by her experiences as an immigrant in Germany, the United States, Canada and France, her practice explores how human identities and worldviews are formed through biology and culture. Informed by science fiction and feminism, Lee constructs speculative narratives across drawing, painting, sculpture, video, performance, research and installation. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the Curitiba Biennial, The Drawing Center, MMCA Korea, SIGGRAPH Asia, Seoul Museum of Art and Cité internationale des arts. She is currently pursuing a practice-based PhD through SACRe at ENS–PSL in Paris.
Wu Chen
2026.07 · London, UK
Multidisciplinary Artist
Wu Chen is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans drawing, installation, writing, digital media and other material forms. Working between dreams, memory and everyday reality, her practice unfolds through liminal states where perception becomes unstable and movement remains suspended. Having lived across different countries and cultures, Wu has developed a lasting sensitivity to transition, becoming and the uncertain boundaries between inner and outer worlds. Her work opens thresholds between becoming and arrival, where transformation remains perpetually unfinished. Wu received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York and an MA from the Royal College of Art in London.
Yuanchi Jiang
2026.05 – 2026.06 · Grenoble, France Painter
Yuanchi Jiang is a Chinese painter based in Grenoble, France. Through painting, observation and contemplation, his practice explores the emotional and perceptual responses evoked by a vast and mysterious nature that precedes human presence. Drawing on fragments collected from landscapes, his works unfold as traces of inner journeys, where memory, sensation and imagination converge. Working through an intuitive and gestural process, Jiang transforms elements of the visible world into open images suspended between light and darkness. Brushstrokes accumulate, disperse and collide, allowing chance to shape the surface and preserving the painting in a state of perpetual becoming rather than fixed completion.
Atelier Véron — Galerie d’Art
Montmartre, Paris
Atelier Véron is not simply a gallery in the traditional sense.
It is an artistic space in Montmartre where studio practice, exhibition and everyday life intersect. Artists come here not only to create, but to enter a network of relationships, perspectives and dialogues at the heart of the Montmartre artistic context.
Here, creation becomes visible. It circulates, transforms and finds its place.
“We are not simply offering a space.
We are creating an entry point into the narratives and structures of the Western art world.
For many artists, the work exists, yet its narrative remains absent; practices are already taking place, yet they remain underrepresented within Western art contexts.
What we are building is therefore not simply an invitation to come to Paris. From Montmartre — a historic and living centre of artistic production — we open a field in which artists can enter, encounter, articulate and position their practices.
Here, artists do not only create.
They build connections, develop their own language, become visible, and leave a record.
Through Montmartre Residency, we hope to expand the presence, visibility and place of artists within the narratives of Western art.
Wanrong SONG
Founder & Curator, Montmartre Residency
Founder, Maison de Kaoshan
OPEN CALL 2027
Applications are now open.
Deadline · October 31, 2026
VOICES
“A deeply valuable experience—not only for the work itself, but for the feeling of becoming part of Montmartre, breathing and resonating with it.”
Jiang Yuanchi Resident Artist · 2026
“I hope that when an artist leaves, they take with them a kind of catalyst—something created during the residency through their encounter with Montmartre. Its effects may not yet be visible, but perhaps one day it will react with a new place, a new encounter, or a new work.”
Jiang Yuanchi Resident Artist · 2026