Most exhibitions ask a building to disappear. At Prada Rong Zhai, the restored Shanghai mansion Prada runs as a cultural venue, the house refuses to step aside, and its new exhibition does not ask it to. “Chuanqi: Spacetime Dialogues at Rong Zhai” treats the villa’s rooms, once the home of the flour magnate Rong Zongjing and his family, as chapters of a story rather than as display space.

The title borrows an old word. Chuanqi first named the short stories of strange and marvelous events written under the Tang and Song dynasties; by the Ming and Qing eras it meant long musical dramas, often devoted to romantic passion, still performed across China. Curator Wu Hung, the art historian and critic, gives each of four contemporary Chinese artists a different part of the residence, so the tale unfolds as visitors walk from room to room. Fondazione Prada supports the project.

The decisive gesture belongs to artist Song Dong. In the Ballroom, the largest room in the house, where formal parties once gathered beneath a stained-glass skylight of sixty-nine panels, he lays a mirror across the floor. The ceiling falls into it and, in the announcement’s words, turns into “a gigantic kaleidoscope”. Around it stand pieces of furniture from ordinary homes, refitted with golden panels and variegated surfaces. Anyone who knows Waste Not, his installation of the household objects his mother kept for decades, which Wu Hung documented, will recognize the material: the domestic leftovers of Chinese life, pushed here toward the fantastic.

Song Dong watercolour sketch for his Ballroom installation: an old wardrobe, mirror and chairs annotated in Chinese — Song Dong, Sketch for Ballroom, 2026. Courtesy the artist

Geng Xue, whose ceramics and video draw on classical Chinese literature, installs a video work in the North Chamber, a long room with windows onto the garden and carved wooden paneling that hides a run of cabinets, probably once a bedroom or a study. Her subject is the seam between subjective and objective reality, apt for a room whose purpose can only be guessed.

Peng Wei takes the Billiards Room and the adjoining Smoking Room, a suite likely built for gentlemen’s leisure, and fills it with more than thirty works centered on women. The sequence opens with The Story of the Corridor, an animation built from classical chuanqi imagery, passes through Moon of the Floating World, inspired by the novelist Eileen Chang, and closes with self-portraits and personal objects in cabinets. Her tiny gilt-framed portraits read like keepsakes left in a men’s club.

Peng Wei miniature painting of a woman in a red robe and black hat holding a tabby cat, in an oval gilt frame — Peng Wei, This Is Her No. 42, 2024. Courtesy the artist

Xiaoze Xie brings Amber of History: Reimagining the Library Cave at Dunhuang into the former bedroom of Mrs. Yung. The Library Cave, Mogao Cave 17, held more than 50,000 manuscripts and artifacts and stayed sealed for nearly a millennium, until its rediscovery in 1900 scattered its contents worldwide. Xie answers that scattering with nine semi-transparent 3D-printed resin models of the cave, arranged on the geometry of a mandala, alongside ink drawings and a 3D projection.

The exhibition spans two floors of Prada Rong Zhai, at 186 North Shaanxi Road in Jing’an District, from 12 November 2026 to 28 February 2027. The house dates to 1918; Prada restored it and opened it to the public in 2017.

The pairing works because the villa was never neutral. A family home restored with obsessive care and reopened to strangers is already a kind of chuanqi. Wu Hung’s bet is that four artists can make that story strange again.

Tags: Fondazione Prada, art exhibitions, Chuanqi: Spacetime Dialogues at Rong Zhai, Geng Xue, Peng Wei, Prada

Prada’s Shanghai mansion Rong Zhai becomes a chuanqi, a marvelous tale told room by room

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