Y Contemporary Art Center is a newly established multifaceted contemporary art institution in Fuzhou, located on the 6th, 7th, and 8th floors of the 200-meter-high Yasheng Tower, with more than 3000 square meters of floor space. It is projected to open its doors to the public at the end of 2026. Its programs encompass exhibitions, public events, and a research-centered artist-in-residency program.

Situated at the confluence of three rivers, whose courses symbolically trace the city’s somewhat semi-colonial past, the Y Contemporary Art Center positions itself as a site located at the intersection of history and the present. Flanked by sky gardens and outdoor spaces and structurally distinct from the rest of the tower, it occupies, vertically, an interstice in the all-glass-facaded commercial complex. Drawing on the unique locality and its history as one of the earliest port cities open to international contact and colonial trade, the Y Contemporary Art Center embraces (supports) art and research practices that bridge history with contemporary reality.

It focuses on art that advances conceptual exploration and intellectual engagement—work that interrogates cultural canons, challenges artistic nomenclature, addresses social conditions, operates cross-disciplinary, and, in short, embodies contemporary art practices that create oscillating spaces between the center and its peripheries. The institution also seeks to expand the scope of contemporary visual art by incorporating into its programs diverse forms of creative practices, such as performing arts, social practices, and creative writings that are traditionally outside the purview of contemporary visual art, while rendering visible knowledge production and creative processes that usually unfold behind closed doors.

The art center operates through a three-pronged approach: a coherently articulated exhibition program, a series of periodic events including workshops, lectures, symposia, and performances, and a residency program.

Within these contexts, we imagine Y Contemporary Art Center itself as a cultural project—one that through eclectic contemporary practices, maps vanishing traces of the region’s long history of cultural encounter, early maritime trade, colonial entanglement, trajectories of emigration, its industrial and urban transformations, whose afterlives, sedimented in contemporary social and economic textures, continue to shape our present reality. Rather than cataloguing histories, it invites artists to use the site and its overlapping temporalities as a palimpsest through which to rethink contemporary art and its role in shaping new understandings of entangled social, cultural, and historical realities.

Y当代艺术中心（Y Contemporary Art Center）是在福州新成立的多元当代艺术机构，位于高200米的亚升大厦六、七、八层，总面积超过3000平方米。该机构预计将在2026年底正式向公众开放。其内容包含展览、公共活动以及以研究为核心的艺术家驻留项目。

Y当代艺术中心坐落于三江交汇之处，这一河流流状象征性地勾连着城市半殖民历史的脉络，使其自我定位于历史与当下的交汇处。艺术中心由空中花园和户外空间环绕，其结构形式也与塔楼主体有所区别，垂直地嵌于这座全玻璃幕墙商业综合体的“缝隙”之中。借由这一独特的地缘位置，以及福州作为最早开放对外交流与殖民贸易的港口城市之一所承载的历史，亚升艺术中心致力于支持能够在历史与当代现实之间搭建桥梁的艺术与研究实践。

机构重点关注推动观念探索与思想参与的艺术实践——包括质疑文化权威、挑战艺术命名体系、关注社会现实、跨学科运作的艺术创作；简言之，即那些在“中心”与“边缘”之间创造动态空间的当代艺术实践。艺术中心也试图通过纳入更为多元的创作形式来扩展当代视觉艺术的范畴，例如表演艺术、社会实践及创意写作等传统上不被视为视觉艺术核心的领域，同时让通常在幕后发生的知识生产与创作过程得以显现。

在这些语境中，我们将Y当代艺术中心本身视为一个文化项目——通过多元的当代实践，勾勒出该地区漫长的文化接触史、早期海上贸易、殖民纠葛、移民轨迹、工业与城市变迁的消逝痕迹，这些历史的余绪沉积在当代社会与经济结构中，并持续塑造我们的现实世界。艺术中心并非意在编目历史，而是邀请艺术家将此处及其多重时间性视作一种“羊皮纸”（palimpsest），以此重新思考当代艺术以及其在理解交错的社会、文化与历史关系中的作用。