19.3 – 5.7.2026
VILLA MALPENSATA – SPAZIO CIELO
The exhibition ‘Fabric of the City’, held at Spazio Cielo in Villa Malpensata, presents over thirty works by Chinese artist Zhang Hong Mei (born in 1973), including paintings and sculptures from her most recent production.
Over the course of her twenty-year career, Zhang Hong Mei has experimented with multiple forms of expression: from painting to performance, sculpture to video art and environmental installations. Her work stands out for its ability to reinterpret traditional techniques in a contemporary key, carving out an original path in the Chinese contemporary art scene. Her stylistic signature stems from the encounter between two fundamental elements: on the one hand, her training in textile design, which began in China and was further developed in Italy; on the other, the practice of paper-cutting, an ancient technique deeply rooted in Chinese popular culture and in the artist’s personal memory.
The title of the exhibition, curated by Massimiliano Vitali (MUSEC), refers both to fabric as the preferred material of her works and to the urban and sociological concept of the stratification of the city. In the canvases on display in Lugano, fragments of red, yellow, green, blue and black fabric are meticulously cut out and assembled according to complex compositional patterns. The exhibition is enriched by a few sculptures created in 2013, in which the act of cutting is transferred from fabric to steel sheets. Shaped and folded as if they were thin paper, they give form to dynamic abstract architectures, confirming the consistency and versatility of Zhang Hong Mei’s artistic research.
Zhang Hong Mei was born in 1973 in Penglai, Shandong Province, eastern China. She studied Textile Design at Shandong University of Art & Design in Jinan and at the Academy of Arts & Design at Tsinghua University in Beijing. In 2006, thanks to a scholarship from the Chinese Ministry of Culture, she spent a year in Italy, where she attended a design course at the Politecnico di Milano. Immersion in the European context, together with professional, artistic and personal encounters in Europe, motivated her to focus more decisively on the visual arts.
Zhang Hong Mei now lives in Jinan, where she has been teaching painting and traditional and contemporary textile art at Shandong University of Art & Design since 2001. To date, she has held around thirty solo exhibitions and participated in around sixty group exhibitions, mainly in China and Italy.
Global Aesthetics è un progetto dedicato all’esplorazione del rapporto tra l’arte contemporanea e il contesto ideologico e culturale in cui essa si muove.
Prevede per sua natura il confronto e l’interazione delle diverse discipline con cui leggere la creatività contemporanea e si offre così come una sperimentata metodologia in grado di conciliare le diverse prospettive in gioco.
