16 OCTOBER 2025 – 25 JANUARY 2026
VILLA MALPENSATA, SPAZIO MOSTRE
The eighth event in the ‘Global Aesthetics’ cycle presents A Rabbit’s Tale, the first major solo exhibition in Europe by Chinese artist Chen Xi, in the Exhibition Space of Villa Malpensata.
The exhibition, conceived and produced by Skira and MUSEC, traces the stylistic and conceptual evolution of one of the most interesting artists on the contemporary Chinese scene through more than sixty works from the 1990s to the present day, drawn from international public and private collections.
Deeply rooted in the history of contemporary China, Chen Xi (Xinjiang, 1968) fuses personal narrative with collective memory through a visual language imbued with symbolic elements, spanning painting and installation. Her work centers on the condition of the individual immersed in the reality of their time, seeking to understand and express it through art. Particularly, Chen Xi’s oeuvre offers a psychological reflection on the transformation of Chinese society since the 1978 Economic Reforms, providing a personal and female perspective on contemporary life, marked by a lucid and critical analysis of daily life, work, family, and traditional values.
The exhibition is divided into seven sections, with the section entitled “Rabbit on the Run” representing the symbolic heart of the entire exhibition project. The rabbit, a recurring figure in Chen Xi’s work, becomes an allegory of the human being: a fragile, elusive entity, full of questions about existence, suffering, joy and the perpetual cycle between tragedy and comedy. The rabbit is also a poetic portrait of the artist herself, who travels through history and time without ever finding definitive answers.
Born in 1968 in Xinjiang province, Chen Xi graduated in painting from the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), Beijing, in 1991, where she currently teaches visual arts. Her career has seen continuous stylistic evolution, from 1990s expressionism to conceptual painting in her Chinese Memories series (2006–2011), which documents China’s historical and social transformations. She has exhibited internationally, including at the 2013 Venice Biennale (in a collateral show co-curated by Achille Bonito Oliva) and the 2021 Chengdu Biennale, where she showed alongside Anish Kapoor and Olafur Eliasson. In 2018, Beijing’s Minsheng Art Museum hosted her solo show Rabbit on the Run, featuring new expressive media, including sculpture and installation. Her works are held in prestigious collections, including CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), Danish Women’s Museum, Beijing Minsheng Art Museum, and Hong Kong University Art Museum.
Global Aesthetics is a project dedicated to exploring the relationship between contemporary art and the ideological and cultural context in which it operates.
By its very nature, it involves the comparison and interaction of different disciplines with which to interpret contemporary creativity, thus offering itself as a tried and tested methodology capable of reconciling the different perspectives at play.
