Prada Rong Zhai in Shanghai opens "Chuanqi: Spacetime Dialogues at Rong Zhai" on November 12, the mansion's first group show of Chinese contemporary artists since it opened as a cultural space in 2017. Curated by art historian Wu Hung with Fondazione Prada's support, it brings together Song Dong, Geng Xue, Peng Wei and Xie Xiaoze with new and recent works across the second and third floors, running through February 28, 2027.

Wu Hung builds the show around "chuanqi", a classical Chinese literary form spanning Tang-dynasty tales of the strange and Ming-Qing romantic drama. He treats the four artists as four movements of one symphony and the house as a character, not a backdrop. Archival research also pushed the mansion's history back beyond the often-cited 1918 purchase by industrialist Rong Zongjing: a Butterfield & Swire merchant was recorded on the street as early as 1906.

The route begins in the ballroom, where Song Dong's site-specific installation "The Ballroom" (2026) lays a mirror floor that reflects the room's stained-glass ceiling of blue roses. Twelve sets of wardrobes from different decades stand on the mirrors, from Republican-era hardwood cabinets to flat-pack shelves bought online, some sawn into chairs, with a square-dancing video and an invitation to dance. Upstairs, Geng Xue extends the house into the cosmos with "Cosmos Liaozhai": the film "Sculptor of the Void" (2024), in which kneading clay echoes the goddess Nuwa shaping humanity, and a folding silk book charting Rong Zhai's place in the galaxy.

Peng Wei takes over two adjoining rooms, once a smoking room and billiard room, unfolding three layers of time in films inspired by Eileen Chang, whose 1944 story collection was itself titled "Chuanqi", alongside her self-portrait series "This Is Her". The final stop is Rong's wife's former bedroom, where Xie Xiaoze revisits the Dunhuang Library Cave, sealed for nearly a millennium before its 1900 opening, through nine resin sculptures cast from 3D scans of the cave and arranged as a three-dimensional mandala. For Wu Hung, the two share no direct historical link, only a visual one: both are spaces sealed, repurposed and rediscovered.