Pipilotti Rist has spent three decades reworking the relationship between video art and and the human body through hypnotic fields of touch and color. The Swiss artist recently landed at Beijing’s UCCA Center for Contemporary Arts, where she unveiled Your Palm is My Universe, her latest immersive solo exhibition.
Curated by Yan Fang, the exhibition presents an elaborate showcase of Rist’s pioneering practice, from name-making pieces like, “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much” (1986) and “You Called Me Jacky” (1990) to never-before-seen works, including a new, large-scale video installation — the museum’s largest commission to date. With roots in ecological thought and Taoist philosophy, her sensorial works offer poetic alternatives to the algorithmic logic of image culture.
Grounding the show is “Your Palm is My Universe” (2025), a newly commissioned installation that transforms UCCA’s Great Hall into a cinematic, dreamlike atmosphere. Loops of hands, feet and faces punctuate draping veils of fabric, as Rist reimagines the space as a “collective organism” against the backdrop an ambient soundscape by Surma. The piece confronts constellations of bodily reality as light and sound ripple through the hall.
Alongside the titular installation, the “Heaven on Earth” wall mural and “Spring Chaoyang Chandelier” of pink swimsuits, build on this exploration of the individual-collective body through ideas of social codes, intimacy and public presentation.
Rist, whose art has long meditated on vulnerability, innocence and the emotional toll of modern life, conjures a luminous world that finds wonder amidst the chaos of information overload. In a recent statement, the museum wrote: “This exhibition is a hypnotically vivid reflection of Rist’s enduring vision of art as a space for empathy, renewal, and imagination to come alive for embodied existence.”
The exhibition is now on view in Beijing through October 19.
UCCA Center for Contemporary Art
4 Jiuxianqiao Rd, Chaoyang,
Beijing, China, 100102
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