(Text /Prada Rong Zhai)
PRADA PRESENTS THE EXHIBITION “CHUANQI: SPACETIME DIALOGUES AT RONG ZHAI” IN SHANGHAI
Prada presents “Chuanqi: Spacetime Dialogues at Rong Zhai,” an exhibition curated by art historian, critic, and curator Wu Hung, bringing together works by four contemporary Chinese artists: Geng Xue, Peng Wei, Song Dong, and Xiaoze Xie. Organized with the support of Fondazione Prada, the project will be on view from 12 November 2026 to 28 February 2027 at Prada Rong Zhai, the historic 1918 residence in Shanghai restored by Prada and reopened to the public in 2017.
“Chuanqi: Spacetime Dialogues at Rong Zhai” features a selection of artworks by Geng Xue, Peng Wei, Song Dong, and Xiaoze Xie, creating a dialogue with the interior spaces and layered history of Prada Rong Zhai. The villa’s rooms, once the backdrop for private life, work, conversations, and social gatherings, provide a distinctly intimate setting, unlike a conventional exhibition venue. The atmosphere feels very domestic yet evocative, shaped by refined architectural details and meticulously restored decorative elements. Each artist is presented in a different area of the residence, opening distinct storylines between reality and illusion, personal memory and historical time. As visitors move through Prada Rong Zhai, the exhibition’s chuanqi gradually unfolds.
The term chuanqi originally described a genre of fictional short stories filled with strange and marvelous tales during the Tang and Song dynasties (7th–13th centuries). By the Ming and Qing eras (14th–20th centuries), its meaning evolved, referring to theater and opera, particularly long musical dramas, often devoted to romantic passions. Over the centuries, the style of chuanqi changed and innovated its content and narrative technique, but its depiction of legendary stories remains, and is still performed throughout China today.
The exhibition spans two levels of Prada Rong Zhai, where artworks in different media become part of the environment and engage it in dialogues across time and space.
Song Dong (1966) conceived a site-specific interactive installation for the Ballroom, the largest room of Prada Rong Zhai where parties and formal events once took place beneath a stained-glass skylight composed of sixty-nine panels featuring historical and modern design elements. The installation features a mirror placed on the floor, embracing the imperfections of the walkable surface’s memory and reflecting the ceiling by turning it into a gigantic kaleidoscope. The artist’s work comprises everyday materials such as pieces of furniture once used in ordinary homes, transformed with golden panels and variegated surfaces that shift between the everyday and the fantastic. With this installation, Song Dong continues his investigation into memory, impermanence, and the transience of human endeavors. Through its components, the installation evokes the structure of the chuanqi, transforming the Ballroom into a space that produces new images, experiences, and meanings.
A video installation conceived by Geng Xue (1983) is displayed in the North Chamber, a long, spacious room featuring windows along one side that overlook the garden of Prada Rong Zhai. Opposite, finely carved wooden paneling conceals a continuous stretch of cabinetry, suggesting the chamber may once have served as a bedroom or private study. Geng Xue’s artistic practice centers on ceramics, sculpture, and video, merging narrative with the exploration of each medium’s visual language. Her work draws inspiration from classical Chinese literature and is distinguished by a persistent inquiry into perception and the boundaries between subjective and objective realities. Through her works, Geng Xue undertakes a conceptual journey into the nature of existence, offering a critical reflection on contemporary life. This echoes the chuanqi tradition, where the spiritual dimension emerges through the elements of human experience.
More than thirty artworks by Peng Wei (1974) are presented in the Billiards Room and the adjacent Smoking Room, in which the coordinated decoration suggests these spaces were likely conceived as a suite for gentlemen's leisure. In these spaces of the villa, no surface is left unadorned, and gilded ceiling molding enhances their three-dimensional effect by reflecting light. Within these rooms, Peng Wei’s female-centered works create three narrative layers that connect the ancient times, Republican China, and the contemporary period. The installation opens with The Story of the Corridor (2026), an animation that draws imagery from classical chuanqi unfolding a fictional woman’s story and continues with Moon of the Floating World (2026), a work inspired by Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) (1920–1995), one of the most influential Chinese writers of the 20th century. It closes with self-portraits and personal objects displayed in cabinets, which create a world belonging to a contemporary woman. Combining paintings, installations, and iPad animation, the works of Peng Wei refer to the chuanqi through her interest in the unpredictability of human nature. Physical and digital media thus become plot twists that visitors reassemble in a timeless journey into female acts of seeing, remembering, and imagining.
Xiaoze Xie’s (1966) multimedia installation, Amber of History: Reimagining the Library Cave at Dunhuang (2017-), is presented in the former owner Mrs. Yung’s bedroom, where low perimeter paneling encircles the interior in carved teak wood, providing layers of visual texture with a range of ornamental references to vegetal patterns and abstracted forms. The artist’s work engages with the mystique of the Dunhuang Library Cave (Mogao Cave 17), part of a vast cave complex in northwestern China carved between the 4th and the 14th centuries by Buddhist monks, pilgrims, and merchants, used as sanctuaries for worship and meditation. The site served for centuries as a hub for trade, religion, culture, and intellectual exchange. The Library Cave, built during the late Tang Dynasty (851–862 A.D.) as a memorial hall for Dunhuang’s chief monk, later became a hidden repository holding over 50,000 manuscripts and artifacts. Sealed for nearly a millennium, it was accidentally rediscovered in 1900, and its contents were dispersed across institutions worldwide. The artist responds to this history of discovery, fragmentation, and loss by reimagining the cave as a site of memory, knowledge, and cultural convergence. Xiaoze Xie presents nine semi-transparent 3D-printed resin sculptures of the Library Cave’s physical
space, arranged according to the geometry of a mandala. Between ink drawings and a multimedia 3D projection, the installation evokes the atmosphere of the chuanqi, transforming emptiness and digital data into the wondrous tale of a millennial memory.
