Past Residents

Residents Map

Past Resident
2024: Canada Council for the Arts

Xiaojing Yan

Xiaojing Yan’s art reflects her cultural journey, culminating in a distinct personal vocabulary. Her unique perspective bridges past and present, exploring themes of identity, nature, and transcendence. Drawing on ancient Chinese traditions, rituals, and materials, Yan uses natural elements to evoke mystical and philosophical reflections on life, death, and humanity’s connection to the natural world. Her work is rich with symbolism that remains as relevant today as it was historically, engaging with issues such as environmental sustainability.

Xiaojing Yan has exhibited work at Suzhou Museum, China; Royal Ontario Museum, Canada; and Sharjah Art Museum, United Arab Emirates, among others.

Past Resident
2024: Creative Australia

Tom Polo

Tom Polo works across painting and installation, creating material forms that capture exchanges between people. His practice draws from a rich accumulation of social encounters, keen observations, and personal histories, recording the emotional and performative relationships between the self and others within social, theatrical, and psychological spaces. Through a blend of abstraction, text, and figuration, Polo explores how conversation and gesture become embodied acts of portraiture, simultaneously masking and revealing the complexities of our inner worlds.

Tom Polo has exhibited work at Art Gallery of New South Wales; Art Gallery of South Australia; and Museum of Contemporary Art Australia (MCA), all in Australia, among others.

Charlie Stein

Charlie Stein’s work explores dominant cultural aesthetics and challenges traditional modes of perception in our digitized, visually overstimulated world. Through extensive research, she translates her insights into drawings, installations, sculptures, and paintings that address social structures, digital media, and communication. Her paintings reflect on contemporary aesthetics, creating a visual language that deconstructs and recontextualizes digital imagery. With degrees in fine art, sociology, and literature, Stein studied under Christian Jankowski and Rainer Ganahl. She is currently a visiting professor at HfbK Hamburg.

Charlie Stein has exhibited work at Manifesta 11, Zürich; Songjiang Art Museum, Shanghai; and SİNOPALE 6, Turkey, among others.