There’s something radically tender in the works of Pipilotti Rist, a universe that never explodes but expands gently. Until October 19, 2025, the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing is hosting Your Palm is My Universe, one of the most immersive and monumental exhibitions ever dedicated to the Swiss artist, an undisputed pioneer of spatial video art.

The beating heart of the exhibition is 掌心宇宙Your Palm is My Universe (2025), a site-specific installation that redefines the boundaries between body, environment, and image. Inspired by a vision that blends Taoist philosophy, ecological thought, and feminism, the work transforms the UCCA’s Great Hall into a living organism: 1,800 square meters of skin-like fabrics, video projections like dreams, and soundscapes composed specifically by experimental musician Surma (Débora Umbelino), which don’t just accompany the images — they inhabit them. Here, looking is no longer enough: you must touch, move, lift. The body is not a guest of the exhibition; it is part of the artwork itself.

As often happens in Rist’s visual world, everything is play and subversion. Hands, feet, and faces multiply and distort across floating surfaces, normalizing the intimate, making public what is usually hidden. The images merge with natural landscapes that seem to breathe, and palm lines transform into topographic maps, where the personal becomes cosmic.

The journey continues with works that blend irony and delicacy, like Spring Chaoyang Chandelier, a chandelier made of pink swimsuits that spray water like a toy fountain.

Or Heaven on Earth, a psychedelic mural created specifically for the Open Gallery, where a poem by the artist and the curatorial text intertwine against a backdrop of saturated colors, becoming a kind of pop prayer.

But rejection also finds its place: The Innocent Collection gathers fragments of transparent packaging — those “instant diamonds” that become invisible once used — and returns them to our gaze as objects worthy of care. A poetic and almost archaeological reflection on what we choose to see, preserve, or forget.

With Your Palm is My Universe, Pipilotti Rist invites us to enter a new grammar of seeing and feeling. A grammar where the body is language, touch is syntax, and perception is never individual but always shared, fluid, collective. An exhibition not to be viewed: but to be lived.