Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai: four Chinese artists in Chuanqi

The stained glass ceiling glows above Prada Rong Zhai, a restored 1920s mansion in Shanghai that has become a significant space for contemporary art. Here, four Chinese artists—Geng Xue, Peng Wei, Song Dong and Xiaoze Xie—are brought into dialogue through Chuanqi: Spacetime Dialogues, an exhibition curated by art historian Wu Hung. The title draws from chuanqi, a classical Chinese narrative form that spans centuries, and the exhibition asks how contemporary practice might work not in isolation but in relation to history and to each other.

Wu Hung is known for his scholarship on Chinese art and his work bridging contemporary practice with historical consciousness. The four artists selected for the exhibition come from different practices: Song Dong, a significant figure in contemporary Chinese art with a long engagement with domestic memory and family narratives; Geng Xue, working in photography and installation; Peng Wei, drawing on landscape painting; and Xiaoze Xie, whose work moves between drawing, sculpture and text. What connects them, in Wu Hung’s conception, is a method of looking to the past in order to address the present moment.

Rong Zhai itself holds weight in this conversation. Built in the 1920s when Shanghai was becoming modern, the mansion carries both Chinese and European architectural language in its stained glass ceilings and compartmentalised wooden cabinetry. Prada’s restoration preserved rather than erased this layered temporality. The space does not read as a neutral white cube. It remains inhabited by its own history, which becomes part of the exhibition’s argument: that time is not linear, and that the past informs present artistic choices about form, material and narrative.

The space itself amplifies this. Rong Zhai was built at a moment when Shanghai was becoming modern, when East and West were negotiating their relationship in architecture and design. Its ceilings are stained glass in patterns that suggest both Chinese and European ornament. Its cabinetry is dark wood, compartmentalised, suggesting storage, archive, history held in wooden cells. Prada acquired and restored the house, and in doing so created something rare: a space that does not erase its own temporality but lives within it. The gallery does not feel new. It feels inhabited by its own past.

Wu Hung has constructed an exhibition that moves beyond the modern gallery’s usual promise of clarity. Chuanqi asks visitors to move through time differently, to let one work inform another across the room, to find meaning not in a single artist’s vision but in the spaces between them. The exhibition acknowledges what Chinese contemporary art has always known: that the past is not behind us. It walks beside us. It informs the choices made about form, about material, about which stories need to be told.

The exhibition remains on view until 28 February 2027, giving visitors ample time to return, to sit with these works, to let the conversation deepen. Chuanqi is not an exhibition to see once. It is a space to inhabit, to move through, to return to as one’s own thinking changes. In this, it honours both the classical narrative tradition its title invokes and the living, breathing practice of four artists working now, in this moment, in this restored mansion, asking what time itself might mean.

Imagery courtesy of Prada (@fondazioneprada).