泰康空间

Taikang Space occupied Courtyard B2 of Red No. 1 in the Caochangdi art district, Cuigezhuang, Chaoyang District, Beijing. Founded in 2003 by Taikang Insurance Group, it was the first non-profit art institution set up by a Chinese financial company. It began near Fuxingmen and moved to Caochangdi in October 2009, turning an industrial courtyard into a research-led contemporary art space. Rather than relying on the scale of a conventional museum, Taikang Space worked through a method it called tracing and encouraging: examining Chinese art-historical material from the 1940s onward while supporting young artists and curators who had not yet become established. Its 51 Square Metres series, staged in a gallery of only 51 square metres between 2009 and 2010, gave successive solo shows to emerging artists and became one of the most influential programmes in Beijing's art ecology. Later research strands addressed painting and architecture, and the institution built the Taikang collection into a systematic holding. In September 2021, after twenty years, it closed with the exhibition Institutional Practice and Production 2003-2021, and in August 2023 it was transformed into the Taikang Art Museum in the Taikang Group tower in Beijing's CBD. The Caochangdi space is no longer open to the public, but its record in corporate collecting, non-profit management and art-historical research remains a key case for understanding private art institutions in China. The original website, taikangspace.com, is no longer updated.