Until January 25, 2026, the MUSEC – Museum of Cultures in Lugano opens its doors to Chen Xi. A Rabbit’s Tale, the first major solo exhibition in Europe by the Chinese artist Chen Xi.
An opportunity to discover an unexpected side of China and an unconventional artist, with a thirty-year career during which she has changed styles, media, and techniques without ever betraying her vision — that of an artist who feels the need to confront the changes of her time.
Born in Xinjiang in 1968, Chen Xi belongs to the generation of artists who grew up in the shadow of the economic reforms of 1978, when China was beginning to reckon with its future. Since the 1990s, her painting has been a way to question reality — social, political, and personal — through a gaze that moves between introspection and critique. In A Rabbit’s Tale, this journey takes the form of a story divided into seven chapters, set across the two main floors of Villa Malpensata, where each section becomes a different lens through which to observe Chen Xi’s world: multifaceted, complex, and deeply rooted in Chinese culture.
From the expressive and textural works of The Everyday — dense with tension and urban vitality — to the silent photorealism of The Queen’s New Clothes, which explores the female body and the construction of identity in the age of visibility.
In Object Language, everyday objects become repositories of memory, while in Rabbit on the Run the rabbit — the recurring, almost totemic figure of the exhibition — transforms into the artist’s alter ego: fragile, ironic, melancholic. A symbol that travels through time, from the earliest canvases to her most recent works, marked by the pandemic and by a collective sense of disorientation that emerges towards the end of the exhibition.
The exhibition unfolds like a flow of images and thoughts. The sketches and drawings of Seeing the Great in the Small reveal the birth of an idea, while the Lace Paintings weave together material and symbolism, reflecting on the sensuality and intimacy of the body. It all leads to No Island Ever Stands Alone, an installation that concludes the journey with two fluid, almost amorphous sculptures poised between the human and the posthuman, between memory and future.
Running through it all is a constant question about being: what does it mean to live, to change, to resist? In Chen Xi’s work, painting is never mere representation, but a way to think about reality — and to survive it.
Curated by Lü Peng with Manuela Schiavano and Massimiliano Vitali, the exhibition is accompanied by a Skira catalog featuring essays by historians and critics such as Francesco Paolo Campione, Jia Fangzhou, and Jeff Kelley, situating Chen Xi among those artists capable of weaving biography and collective history, fragility and visionary strength. A Rabbit’s Tale is therefore not a retrospective, but rather an emotional map: the journey of an artist who, through a rabbit on the run, continues to tell the story of the instability and the beauty that still remain in our time.
