UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents “Pipilotti Rist: Your Palm is My Universe” between July 19, 2025, and October 19, 2025, a sensually immersive solo by the pioneering Swiss spatial video artist. The exhibition is anchored by 掌心宇宙Your Palm is My Universe (2025), a newly conceived, site-specific video installation commissioned by UCCA and layered with a specially-created sound composition of the same title by experimental multiinstrumentalist Surma (Débora Umbelino), alongside iconic works that transform UCCA’s Great Hall into a sensorial cosmos of flowing image and layered soundscapes. Interweaving perspectives of female empowerment with ecological philosophy and Taoist ethos, this landmark presentation brings forth Rist’s radiant universe of whimsical defiance.

From July 19, 2025, to October 19, 2025, UCCA Center for Contemporary Art presents “Pipilotti Rist: Your Palm is My Universe,” an immersive solo exhibition by pioneering artist Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962, Grabs, Switzerland), who has been celebrated across decades for her radical approach to spatial video installations. Since the mid-1980s, Rist has challenged the boundaries between video, sculpture, installation, and performance, drawing on multimedia and ecological philosophies to create immersive spaces and images that encourage wonder, contemplation, and playful connection, spiritually and logically. Curated by UCCA Curator Yan Fang, this exhibition offers a sweeping encounter with Rist’s evolving practice—one that critically engages with contemporary image culture while proposing poetic alternatives to its algorithmic logic. Rooted in feminist thought and Taoist philosophy, her work envisions a more inclusive, non-anthropocentric world.

Commissioned by UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, monumental video installation 掌心宇宙Your Palm is My Universe (2025) transforms the Great Hall into a colorfully charged micro-universe—a space where themes of touch, perception, and expression unfold at their fullest. Spanning 1,800 square meters, it is the largest artwork in physical dimensions the museum has commissioned since its establishment in 2007. The work features delicate, “skin”-like fabrics draped throughout the space, on which a series of looped videos play with a layered soundscape composed by musician Surma (Débora Umbelino) for Rist’s work. Visitors are encouraged to touch and engage, emphasizing the deeply experiential approach of the work and dissolving the perceived distance between the installation and viewer. As the videos are projected onto the fabrics, they also become living, breathing elements of the expansive, somatic artwork. The site-specific nature of the installation adds another layer of experience. Rist imagines the Great Hall as a symbolic body—a collective organism housing the manifestation of her artistic vision for the museum and its audience. Foundational elements of her creative ethos—the human form and sensation—guide the visitor’s eye, humanizing warped visuals and normalizing bodily realities. Here, hands, feet, and faces appear throughout the moving images, extending beyond their frames in gestures inviting engagement rather than passive viewing.

Reinforcing corporeal themes, delicate “skin”-like fabrics and connective tissues stretched over the immense “ribcage” of the Great Hall’s ceiling. Projected visuals play across these unevenly draped surfaces, upending notions of orientation and recalling how eyes invert images before the brain processes them. Visitors are encouraged to lift and shift these layers, actively shaping their experience and those of others around them, underscoring the communal nature of perception.

The piece also fluidly bridges inner and outer realms. While evoking the sensation of being enveloped within a colossal body, the projected imagery features pastoral landscapes—fields, mountains, gardens—sometimes transformed through vibrant color shifts. These views reflect both a connection to nature and an acknowledgment of human impact on the environment. Extreme close-ups morph plants into vast terrains, emphasizing the reciprocal relationship between organism and habitat. Visible palm lines on screen evoke borders or topographic maps, symbolically linking the minute and the monumental, and illustrating the deep interdependence of bodies, places, and ecological cycles.

Another recurring thread in Rist’s practice is the playful subversion of norms and merging the private with the public. Hanging in the Open Gallery is Spring Chaoyang Chandelier (2025), a “chandelier” of swimsuits dyed pink incorporated with a fountain. This installation extends Rist’s approach of bringing intimacy into the public: a fountain-like structure composed of pink-dyed swimwear, transforming the museum into something between a water park in an oneiric space, inviting viewers to a world where the usual social codes are undone with a whimsical naturalness.

Adding to the fun-saturated environment is Heaven on Earth (2025), a wallpaper mural conceived in radiant splashes of yellow, pink, and blue, designed by Rist specially for the UCCA Open Gallery. Layered atop this vibrant visual field are a poem by the artist and curator’s preface, presented bilingually, which introduce a reflective literary undercurrent that deepens the emotional and conceptual resonance of the exhibition space and the works presented within.

Facing the street along UCCA’s signature irregular glass facade, The Innocent Collection (1985-c.2054) presents a Beijing iteration of Rist’s long-term project of collecting unmarked, mass-produced packaging—translucent plastic materials referred to as “instant diamonds.” These castoffs are reassembled into a delicate sculptural installation that, in keeping with the exhibition’s focus on reawakening perception and softening fixed boundaries, invites viewers to reconsider what is deemed worthy of attention or care. Though these objects were initially designed to preserve and protect, they would later become waste; here, they are redeemed—made “innocent” once more—reminding us that beauty and meaning can be found in even the most ephemeral forms.

Flanking and complementing the conceptual and emotional ground for 掌心宇宙Your Palm is My Universe are a selection of Rist’s early single-channel videos. Part of the exhibition’s Public Programs, these works are scheduled to screen in the UCCA Auditorium every Friday and Saturday throughout its run, free of charge. From the fragmented chant of I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986) to the glitching confessions of (Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler ([Absolutions] Pipilotti’s Mistakes) (1988), these pieces dismantle fixed identities and conventional media narratives. Through feminist critique and pop culture remix, Rist distorts sound and image to reveal how emotion and selfhood are shaped, unsettled, and reformed by the screen’s flicker and rhythm. This sensibility evolves in works like You Called Me Jacky (1990) and I'm a Victim of This Song (1995), where music becomes a fragile vessel for humor, longing, and vulnerability. Raw, playful, and fiercely intimate, these early videos reclaim mass media’s tools—camera, frame, sound—dissolving the barrier between “screen” and “viewer” to reconfigure perception.

Cheekily grandiose, “Pipilotti Rist: Your Palm is My Universe” is a luminous exploration of bodily perception, collective experience, and reconnecting with the quiet, or even misunderstood, beauty of the everyday. In this saturated and immersive environment, through layered visuals and sound, Rist blurs boundaries between the perception and reality to reimagine connection and presence in an age shaped by technology and rapid change. 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.

About the Artist

Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962, Grabs, Switzerland; lives and works in Zurich) studied commercial art, illustration, and photography at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 1982 to 1986, then furthered her studies with audio visual communications (video) at the Basel School of Design. Since the mid-1980s, Rist has been exhibiting her work worldwide and became a central figure within the international art scene.

Rist’s recent solo exhibitions include “Electric Idyll” (Fire Station, Doha, 2024); “Behind Your Eyelid” (Tai Kwun, Hong Kong, 2022); “Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor” (The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles, California, 2021-2022); “Your Eye Is My Island” (The National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan, 2021); “Open My Glade” (Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, 2019); “Pixel Forest” (LUMA Arles, Arles, France, 2018); “Sip my Ocean” (Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Sydney, 2017-2018); “Pixel Forest and Worry Will Vanish” (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2017); “Pixel Forest” (New Museum, New York, 2016-2017); and “Your Saliva is my Diving Suit in the Ocean of Pain” (Kunsthaus Zurich, Zurich, 2016).

Public Programs

For the exhibition period, UCCA has curated a series of public programs that take the body as a point of departure, traversing the boundaries of moving image, music, and thought to invite audiences on an artistic journey of perception and expression. To highlight Pipilotti Rist’s early exploration of the female body, sensory experience, and the language of video, UCCA will screen a series of her iconic works spanning 1986 to 1995 on a loop every Friday and Sunday in the UCCA Auditorium, Beijing, beginning July 20, 2025.

For the exhibition’s opening, UCCA Curator Yan Fang and Nike Dreyer, Pipilotti Rist’s Studio Manager, will lead a special tour of the exhibition. The same day will also feature an experimental music performance by three acclaimed musicians—Surma, gogoj, and VAVABOND. Responding in resonance to Rist’s lush and introspective artistic world, the musicians will perform around a shared emotional and conceptual thread: “compression.” Inspired by the Beijing edition of the ongoing “The Innocent Collection” series of works, UCCA will also organize a hands-on workshop on August 16, inviting participants to create “instant diamonds” from reclaimed transparent plastic—discovering fleeting yet radiant moments from everyday life.

A highlight of the public programs curated for this exhibition is the parallel conversation series “She, Universe: Women’s Position in Literature, Sociology, and Film Studies.” Extending the exhibition’s context into humanities and social sciences, this conversation series will critically examine and reflect on the cultural norms and orthodoxies imposed on women, how women raise their voices through literature. The final session returns to film studies, focusing on how generations of European women filmmakers have used the camera to document their explorations of bodily boundaries and the liberation of self.

Support and Sponsorship

UCCA thanks Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia Shanghai, Switzerland Tourism, and Kvadrat for their exhibition support. Gratitude to Swiss International Air Lines and Swissôtel Beijing Hong Kong Macau Center for their special support. Exclusive wall solutions support is provided by Dulux. UCCA also thanks the members of UCCA Foundation Council, International Circle, and Young Associates, as well as Lead Partner Aranya, Lead Art Book Partner DIOR, Lead Imaging Partner vivo, Presenting Partner Bloomberg, and Supporting Partners AIA, Barco, Dulux, Genelec, SKP Beijing, and Stey.