Throughout Pipilotti Rist’s practice, there is a sense of boundaries being gleefully overlooked, of social norms cheerfully being cast aside. In her early video works, she takes the bedroom dance routines and singalongs of music fans and nudges them into the public realm. Elsewhere she exposes the body, but does so to point to its normality and naturalness rather than to shock or titillate. In Spring Chaoyang Chandelier (2025), Rist once again orchestrates an unexpected collision between her materials and their context, erasing divisions between private and public.

Two things stand out about this “chandelier”: first, it incorporates a fountain, and second, rather than glass or brass, it is primarily made out of swimming trunks. The swimsuits both suggest the exposure of parts of our bodies usually only seen in private, and the transformation of the museum into a carefree water park. The suspended garments, irregularly dyed pink, bring to mind the expression “airing out dirty laundry,” but nothing sordid is being revealed here: Rist works with the double meaning of “light” in English—referring to both illumination and weightlessness—to invite visitors into the exhibition unburdened by embarrassment, open-minded and ready to explore a space where everyday life becomes something fantastical, its arbitrary standards and codes of etiquette melting away.

In the mid-1980s, Pipilotti Rist began making video art that drew inspiration from underground music, performance art, expanded cinema, the Fluxus movement, counterculture, and feminism. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the UCCA Auditorium will host regular screenings of four of her most representative video works from the 1980s and 1990s, complementing the site-specific installations on display in the galleries and offering a more comprehensive overview of her creative trajectory. These pieces include her breakout work, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), created while she was still a student, along with (Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler ([Absolutions] Pipilotti's Mistakes) (1988), You Called Me Jacky (1990), and Opfer dieses Liedes (I’m a Victim of This Song) (1995). In many of these videos, Rist sings her own reinterpretations of pop songs. Building a visual language out of disjointed editing, repetition, glitches, shifting speeds, and distorted colors, she subverts the music video genre, which at the time was becoming increasingly aesthetically conservative. Here, the artist also critiques the ways in which women are coded and disciplined in music videos, and how this system of visual representation creates problematic standards.

Pipilotti Rist has long been interested in how the body interacts with the outside world. From retinas to endoscopes, visual mediums that connect the internal and external frequently appear in her work, along with imagery related to digestion. In her view, “Our society has a weak psyche that focuses on externals and concrete things, on colors and perceptions that are produced on the retina in collaboration with the brain.” By exploring internal bodily imagery and the digestive process, Rist re-examines basic physiological mechanisms that we often take for granted, while also prompting us to consider how, in a world overloaded with information and images, we as individuals receive, store, and filter external stimuli.

These themes surface in several works in the exhibition, most notably in Digesting Impressions (1993). This piece consists of a women’s bathing suit hanging from the ceiling, with an old-fashioned round television monitor where the wearer’s abdomen would be. Previous versions of the work included a video of an endoscope passing through the intestines. However, this time the artist has omitted the footage, leaving behind only static. The original exploration of digestion is replaced with an electronic device searching for an external signal, offering a metaphorical representation of how the human eye processes information. The entirety of the screen is covered by the swimsuit, ensuring that the black and white fuzz is only faintly visible, and posing questions to viewers: Has any signal been received? What has been filtered? The work is placed within a dim, winding corridor lined with pleated curtains, evoking the sensation of travelling through “intestines” into an inner world—where Rist’s sensorial universe awaits.

The human body has always been central to Pipilotti Rist’s art. Throughout her practice it entices the viewer’s eye, humanizes distorted video textures, and destigmatizes bodily functions. In the 1996 video work Mutaflor, she even uses some creative editing to make it seem like the camera passes through her body. This element remains present in 掌心宇宙 Your Palm is My Universe (2025), but not only most obviously through the hands, feet, and faces that appear in the piece’s video component. In fact, the artist views UCCA’s Great Hall as the center of the metaphorical “body” formed by the museum and its public.

Hanging under the gallery’s massive roof trusses, layers of textiles evoke skin and fascias (connective tissue) attached to a gigantic ribcage. The bodily connotations of these opaque and translucent sheets are echoed on the floor by tufted carpets depicting blood cells. By projecting video on irregularly draped fabrics, confusing strict definitions of up and down, the artist also suggests parallels with the inside of our eyes, in which images are formed upside down and flipped by our brains.

Viewers are encouraged to push or lift the veils, in doing so altering others’ perceptions of the artwork and positioning these textiles as counterparts of our eye muscles. Visitors may also choose to work together to manipulate the screens, producing views unobtainable through individual intervention. By constructing an installation in which our actions impact the impressions of those around us, and vice versa, Rist reminds us that we experience art collectively, as part of a community.

As suggested by its title, 掌心宇宙 Your Palm is My Universe (2025) is rich in symbolism related to hands, skin, and the sense of touch. Besides showing their palms in gestures of openness, the multiple hands in the piece’s video elements twist and extend, seemingly attempting to reach beyond their screens and touch viewers. These movements are intended to be responded to, rather than passively observed.

In this deeply interactive work, viewers may lift up the fabric “skins” draped throughout the Great Hall, deforming these screens and altering the appearance of the video, or stick their heads through holes cut in the textiles, gaining new perspectives. Transgressing a museum-going taboo, visitors are encouraged to touch the art and appreciate the tactile sensations offered by its screens and carpets. Thanks to the scale of the project, they may actually touch individual projected pixels, subverting the idea of the “touch screen.” As hands and the occasional foot drift overhead, Rist plays with how the English word “digital” can refer to both computer technology and fingers or toes.

Meanwhile, the suspended textiles allow some rays of light to pass through and reflect others, paralleling how skin serves as both a permeable membrane and protective barrier. There is no single definitive way to experience or view 掌心宇宙 Your Palm is My Universe, which is intended to be felt, in addition to seen and heard—it comes alive through how the visitor chooses to explore it.

掌心宇宙 Your Palm is My Universe (2025) moves seamlessly between interior and exterior worlds: though the installation is intended in part to give viewers the impression of being inside a massive body, its video component repeatedly features shots of landscapes. Cameras slowly pan over fields dotted with trees, mountains visible in the background with blue skies above them (that is, when the color palette hasn’t been doctored into psychedelic hues). These scenes may seem to be bucolic, embodying a return to a more natural way of living. However, many of the landscapes shown are the product of industrial agriculture, as evidenced by the fields’ tidy rows and the tractors driving through them. At other points in the video, extreme close-ups transform stalks of flowers into entire trees, and vegetables like cauliflower and lettuce into rocky terrain and riverine systems, respectively.

In Mercy Garden Retour Skin (2014), Rist explored underexamined aspects of masculinity through the tender care that a male farmer showed for his crops; here, she plays with the gendered concept of “Mother Nature,” featuring shots of a female figure running through a manicured garden while highlighting how agriculture reshapes the natural world. The artist presents humans and landscapes existing within a complex symbiotic system, each capable of impacting the other. Blown up through projection, the palm lines visible in the video resemble borders or topographical details, emphasizing connections between bodies and landscapes, microcosms and macrocosms.

Inspired by a trip to the Red Sea, Pipilotti Rist returned to her hometown of Grabs in the Rhine Valley and began filming underwater landscapes in nearby bodies of water, which would become part of 4th Floor to Mildness (2016). Gently swaying in the hazy light of murky river water, the aquatic plants featured in the work evoke Monet’s “Water Lilies” and foreshadow imagery used in Rist’s Sip My Ocean (2017)—specifically, unexpected glimpses of colorful coral and tangled underwater flora. In these video works, Rist invites viewers to dive into a submarine world and drift through the dreamy interplay of sunlight and color.

In the newly commissioned 掌心宇宙Your Palm is My Universe (2025), soft curtain-like textiles and interwoven video landscapes conjure up a fluid space in which images and viewers may dissolve into one another. No longer confined to static frames, images spill freely beyond all spatial boundaries—splashing onto fabrics, against bodies, the gallery floor, and walls. Viewers may pass through the screens, “flowing” into images. Rist infuses this work with the tenderness, adaptability, mercifulness, and tranquility of water. The projector—ordinarily thought of as an emotionless machine—becomes the source of a sentient body of water, enveloping and cradling viewers in this ever-shifting universe.