8-Day China Art & Design Exchange: Shanghai and Suzhou Studios

Airport/hotel transfer, luxury business hotel check-in, business district orientation guide distribution, free personal arrangement

Participants arrive in Shanghai and check in to a luxury business hotel located in the central financial district. The day is dedicated to settling in and acclimatizing, with free time for personal exploration. A customized business district orientation guide is provided to help participants navigate the financial hub easily, and camp staff are available for any on-site assistance.

Morning — the brief
The studio and the makers are arranged through our local partner, and the studio, the participating students and the programme are confirmed before you travel. The week opens with one brief, agreed in advance by the two sides rather than handed down by the visiting group: this year's theme might be the courtyard, the lane, water, or one object carried from home. The brief is deliberately narrow, and the reason is explained at the start - a theme with edges produces work that can be exhibited, while a theme like identity or globalisation produces work that cannot. The morning continues with a look at how the partner students work, what they are studying, and what a studio week looks like for them: long hours, group critiques, and a portfolio that is the only thing that counts at the end.

Late morning — materials and methods
A materials session sets out what is available and what is permitted: paper and board, pencil, ink, gouache and acrylic, linocut and rubber block printing, natural indigo dye, textiles, bamboo, clay, wire, found objects from the neighbourhood, and the digital tools the partner students use for layout and documentation. Health and safety comes with it and is enforced by the studio's own staff: cutting mats and away-strokes with any blade, goggles for grinding or spraying, extraction or open windows for solvents and dyes, gloves for dye baths, no machine operated without instruction, and nothing left on a floor where someone can trip over it. Visiting participants use hand tools only, under supervision.

Lunch
In the studio or at a place nearby, eaten late because nobody wants to stop working.

Afternoon — mixed teams, one piece
Teams are formed with two or three visitors and two or three partner students in each, and each team is asked to produce one work by the end of the week - not one work per person, and this is the rule that makes the exercise demanding. Teams spend the afternoon on research and sketching: a mood board, two or three compositional studies, a decision about medium and scale, and a written note of who is doing what. The facilitator circulates and asks the same question of every team: which part of this is a decision and which part is decoration. Before the day ends, each team sets out in writing how the work will be credited and who owns it, which is not a formality - joint work has to be agreed rather than assumed.

Evening — the neighbourhood
Before dinner, a walk through the surrounding lanes. The city around the studio is the material for the week: stone-gate lane houses from the 1920s and 1930s with Western-influenced facades, converted into studios since the late 1990s, a wet market, an old factory block, and a section of the Suzhou Creek where a 1930s textile mill has been a gallery district for two decades. Participants are asked to choose one thing in that walk to bring back into the work tomorrow.

Cultural Insight — why co-creation is harder than it looks
Two groups making one work will disagree about the thing they thought they agreed about, usually on day two. The disagreements are the useful part: how much drawing is finished enough, whether a surface should be left raw, whether to write the title in one language or two, and who gets to decide. Teams that spend twenty minutes setting out a process - who decides what, and how a deadlock gets resolved - finish the week with a better piece and a much better account of how it was made.

Safeguarding and consent
Participants under 18 remain under the supervision of their own accompanying teachers and the studio's staff under a two-adult rule, are never alone with a local adult, use hand tools only and no powered equipment, exchange no private contact details, and take or publish no photograph of any person without their agreement and, where the person is a minor, the written consent of a parent or guardian.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Shanghai.

Morning — site and subject
Zhujiajiao sits at the western edge of Shanghai, where the canals narrow and the roads give out. It has been a market town for centuries, and its fabric is the material of the day: whitewashed walls, grey tile, narrow lanes opening onto water, stone steps down to the canal, and bridges of single, three and five arches. The five-arched Fangsheng Bridge, built in the 1570s, is the largest stone arch bridge in the Shanghai area and carries people in both directions all day. The rules for working here are the ordinary ones for a sketch day in a working town: do not block a doorway, a step or a boat landing, ask before drawing anyone close, do not enter a house or a courtyard that is a private home, carry everything out with you, and take no photograph of a child without a parent's agreement.

Late morning — one subject, six ways
Mixed teams are given a single subject - a bridge, a doorway seen from the far bank, a boat, the reflection under a wall - and asked to draw it six times in ninety minutes: once fast, once with the paper turned sideways, once in pure tone, once in line only, once from close up so that the subject is no longer recognisable, and once from memory at the end. The exercise is about seeing rather than about skill, and it usually works: by the fourth drawing people have stopped trying to produce a picture and started looking at what is in front of them. Materials are simple and unhurried - pencil, brush pen, dip pen, one pot of ink, cartridge paper - and nobody is drawing on a tablet except to record a reference.

Lunch
In the town: rice noodles, braised pork knuckle, glutinous rice cakes cooked on the street, and the soybean and pork knuckle dishes the town is known for along this stretch of the canal.

Afternoon — critique, then a second pass
The teams lay out everything they have made on a table and critique each other's work, with one rule: you may say what you see and what you would do next, but not whether you like it. The facilitator asks each group to choose its strongest three sheets and explain the choice, which is usually where the day's learning happens, because the sheets people like and the sheets that are working are rarely the same. The last hour turns the chosen studies into design material rather than finished drawings: cropping, repeating, scanning, reducing to line, turning into a pattern, folding into a paper model. Some of this feeds directly into the exhibition piece.

Cultural Insight — drawing in public, in a place not built for it
A foreigner sitting on a canal-side step with a sketchbook attracts attention in a Chinese town, mostly friendly and sometimes continuous. Residents will look over a shoulder, comment, take a photograph of the person drawing, and occasionally ask to see the book; elderly men will explain, at length, that the bridge was here long before either of you. Participants are asked to treat all of that as part of the practice rather than an interruption, and to be careful about the reverse - photographing people who are going about their day.

Safeguarding and consent
Under-18 participants are supervised by their own teachers and the programme staff under a two-adult rule throughout, and written parental consent is held for each of them. The canal edges, stone steps and boat landings are working edges: nobody draws from a mooring point without permission, nobody leans over a bridge parapet, and no participant leaves the group's agreed stretch of the town.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Shanghai.

Morning — Wukang Road & Fuxing Park
Meet at Wukang Road and walk the historic street amid well-preserved Western-style villas and plane trees; visit the Wukang Mansion, a famous Art Deco landmark. Continue to Fuxing Park, a classic Shanghai park blending French and Chinese styles where locals practice tai chi and play chess.

Afternoon — M50 & Anfu Road
Enjoy a leisurely lunch at a cafe in the French Concession, then visit M50 Creative Park, a former textile mill turned art zone with galleries, studios, and design shops. Explore exhibitions, meet local artists, and see street art, then walk Anfu Road's boutiques and cafes for the local artistic lifestyle.

Evening (Optional) — Performance or Dinner
Attend a performance at the Shanghai Dramatic Arts Centre or dine at a French-style bistro (optional, not included).

Morning — why Suzhou
Suzhou is laid out on canals and has been a city for two and a half thousand years; for centuries it was also the workshop of the Chinese court, where the imperial silk administration took the best of the region's thread and put its own name on it. That legacy is still alive in small workshops, not just museums, and the day is organised through our local partner with the studios, the makers and the programme confirmed before you travel. The morning begins with one process, watched properly from the start: silk. A single cocoon unwinds into a filament several hundred metres long, and reeling, throwing, dyeing and weaving a piece of cloth takes long enough that the price of real hand-woven silk stops being a surprise.

Late morning — one process per team, hands on
Teams then split and each takes one process well enough to actually use it. Embroidery: stretching cloth on a frame, splitting a silk thread into finer strands, and working a small motif in one or two stitches until the tension is even - the double-sided pieces kept in museum collections represent years of practice, and nobody here is pretending otherwise. Woodblock printing: carving a simple block in relief, inking it, registering the paper and pulling a print by hand or on a small press, including the several imperfect pulls that come first. Paper and fan work: cutting, folding, pleating, mounting a leaf onto ribs, and understanding why a folding fan is a piece of engineering. Every process is taught by the person who makes a living from it, and every tool is handed to the participant by that person.

Lunch
Near the workshops, in one of the old lanes off Pingjiang Road, where the canal runs between the houses and the food is plain Suzhou cooking - noodles in a clear broth, sweet braised pork, river fish, and small dumplings.

Afternoon — from process to the piece
After lunch, each team returns to the exhibition brief with its new process and decides how to use it: embroidery on a printed surface, a block-printed ground behind a drawing, a paper structure that folds into the work, or a repeated motif built from the morning's carving. The makers advise on what will survive a wall for a week and what will not, which is practical advice that changes most teams' plans. Nothing produced is sold; works are completed for the exhibition the following day, and anything that a workshop keeps as a sample is kept only with the maker's agreement and with the authorship recorded in writing, including the names of every participant who worked on it.

Cultural Insight — the economics of a craft
Ask any of these makers a direct question and the answer is sobering: how many hours in one piece, what it sells for, how much of the price is materials, who buys it, and whether their children intend to continue. Some processes survive because a market exists for them at the top end; others survive because a museum, a school or a tourism programme pays for demonstration. The honest conclusion - that buying nothing and photographing everything does not support a craft - is a useful one for a group of design students to carry home.

Safeguarding and consent
Participants under 18 are supervised by their own teachers and the studio's staff under a two-adult rule, use hand tools under instruction only, and do not operate any press, machine or heat tool themselves. No private contact details are exchanged with makers or students, and no photograph of any person is taken, stored or published without consent, with written parental consent required where the person is a minor.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Suzhou.

Morning — Humble Administrator's Garden
Suzhou's largest and most celebrated classical garden, a UNESCO World Heritage Site built in the Ming dynasty. Its pavilions, lotus ponds, and zigzag bridges embody scholarly landscape design, including the “borrowed scenery” technique that frames distant pagodas. The Hall of Distant Fragrance is a central highlight.

Afternoon — Suzhou Museum & Pingjiang Road
The Suzhou Museum, designed by architect I. M. Pei, pairs a minimalist water-themed structure with ancient Chinese art and artifacts. Then stroll Pingjiang Road, a 1,200-year-old canal-side lane of whitewashed houses, silk shops, and teahouses, where you can sip Biluochun tea and try squirrel-shaped mandarin fish.

Evening — Flexible Evening
The evening is yours to enjoy at your leisure in Suzhou.

Morning — hanging a show
The exhibition is small, real and finished, and the morning is spent doing the work that makes it look as though nothing was done. Teams measure the wall and agree a hang before anything goes up: a centre line at about 150 centimetres, consistent spacing, heavier works at eye level, labels level and to the side, and a numbered plan so that the show can be re-hung the same way. Work on paper is mounted and, where necessary, glazed or sealed; textiles are hung so that they do not stretch; three-dimensional pieces get a plinth or a marked footprint. Lighting is adjusted to protect the work rather than to flatter it - paper and dyed textiles are kept low, in the range museums use for works on paper, and direct sun is kept off everything. The venue is arranged through our partner and is normally a gallery or a school space, confirmed before departure.

Late morning — labels, credits and the ownership question
Labels are written by the teams and checked twice: title, medium, dimensions, date, and the names of every participant who worked on the piece, in the order the team agreed on the first day. Where a maker taught and advised rather than made, their contribution is credited as advice, which is both honest and normal practice. The facilitator then takes the group through the part that studios often fudge: joint work belongs to the people who made it by agreement, not by assumption; a piece cannot be photographed, reproduced, sold or entered for a competition without the agreement of everyone credited; and if the show travels or is documented for a website, each participant signs for their own contribution and, where they are under 18, a parent or guardian signs with them. Consent forms are collected before the opening, not after.

Lunch
Together with the partner students and the makers who have come for the opening, which is the point at which the week stops being a programme and starts being a group of people who made something.

Afternoon — the opening
The show opens for a short, real opening rather than a private view for the group: partner students, workshop makers, the venue's staff and, where the school or community is involved, families. Two participants and two partner students speak briefly - two minutes each, in both languages - and then the room is left to look. Photographs of the exhibition are taken from the back, with the consent forms governing who may appear; images of any minor are used only where a parent or guardian has signed, and nothing is posted publicly until the whole set has been checked against the forms.

Late afternoon — critique
The closing crit is run properly: each team stands with its work and takes questions from the makers and from the other teams about intention, material and decisions - what changed during the week and why, what the work is doing that the sketch did not, and what the team would do differently with another week. Comments are recorded by each team and written up the same evening, because a critique that is not written down is a conversation. The makers are asked to speak last and to say what they would change about the work rather than whether they like it, and their answers are the ones most participants write down.

Cultural Insight — exhibitions, and what they are for
The value of a week-long exhibition is not the show; it is the standard the show imposes. Once there is a date and a wall, a team has to finish, choose, measure, resolve the argument about which version is the real one, and put its names on it. That is the difference between a workshop and a practice, and it is the reason the exhibition is scheduled at the end of the week rather than treated as an optional extra. A deadline and a wall also settle arguments that a discussion cannot: once two versions of the same piece have to be chosen between, the team discovers what it actually thinks, and usually discovers that the version it preferred on Tuesday was never the stronger one.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
In Suzhou.

Morning — portfolio review
Each participant has twenty minutes with a facilitator and, where possible, one of the makers: fifteen or twenty images in sequence, sketches included, on a table or a screen. The review follows a fixed structure so that it is useful rather than flattering - what the work is about, what the sequence does, what the strongest three pieces are and why, what should be removed, and what should be made next. Participants are asked to write the answers down themselves rather than to be told, because the portfolio that matters three years from now will be selected by them alone.

Late morning — take-down, and what goes where
The show comes down the way it went up, with the work documented first: each piece photographed flat or in place, with its label and its credit list, and the images filed with the consent forms that govern them. Joint works leave with the partner students unless the team agreed otherwise in writing; individual pieces travel home rolled or in a folder, and anything too large to fly is packed and shipped at cost, which is decided before departure rather than in the departure hall. The venue is left as it was found, and the team that hung the show is the team that sweeps it.

Lunch
A farewell lunch with the partner students and the facilitators, and the last chance to say what the week was worth and what was not.

Afternoon — closing and departure
A short closing session states the status of the programme plainly: it is a cultural exchange with studio practice, it carries no academic credit, it leads to no qualification or admission anywhere, and certificates of participation record dates, contact hours and the names of the partner organisations, not achievement. Participants then transfer to Suzhou North railway station, from which Shanghai is 25 to 35 minutes by high-speed train and Beijing around four and a half hours, or onward by road to Shanghai's airports. Your guide confirms the platform or the check-in deadline in advance and travels with the group to the departure point.

Cultural Insight — what to do with a week of looking
The habit worth keeping from this programme is the one that costs nothing: draw the thing in front of you six times instead of photographing it once, ask a maker how long the work took before asking what it costs, and write down what was decided and who decided it. Those habits survive the trip, and they are the difference between a designer who has travelled and a designer who has looked. The work itself is best judged six months later, when the sketches from a canal town turn up in a project that has nothing to do with China - which is the ordinary way that a week of looking pays for itself.

Meals
Breakfast, Lunch

Accommodation
Day ends on departure - no hotel night included.