Agenda - sinokultur

In our event calendar you will find current cultural events related to Chinese culture in Switzerland. We are thankful for your tips regarding interesting events.
Please send your information to info@sinokultur.ch.

The 22nd Zurich Film Festival opens on 24 September, and this year's programme features two standout films from the Greater China region.

A Girl Unknown (《无名女孩》), part of the Feature Film Competition, is directed by Chinese filmmaker Zou Jing (邹静, b. 1984).

Set against the backdrop of China's one-child policy, the film follows Juan's journey from the 1980s into the 2000s. Passed between three different families and given a new identity each time, she grows up searching for where she truly belongs. As a teenager working in a factory, she decides to reconnect with her biological family, confronting the lasting impact of mass adoptions in China.

This moving coming-of-age drama about identity, loss and resilience premiered at Cannes Critics' Week, where it received multiple awards.

Screenings

24 Sept, 20:15 – Arthouse Piccadilly 1; 28 Sept, 15:00 – Kinokoni 6; 2 Oct, 17:45 – Kinokoni 6 (with the director); 3 Oct, 18:15 – Corso 4 (with the director)

We Are Born Good (《善男信女》), part of the Signature Section, is directed by Hong Kong filmmaker Yeung Leung Chuen (楊兩全), one of the city's emerging directors.

A seemingly trivial dispute over a wrong restaurant order spirals into an increasingly absurd feud between aspiring actress Zoey, burdened by debt, and restaurant owner Wing-kat, who is struggling to rebuild his life after prison. As tensions escalate, hostility gradually gives way to an unexpected connection.

Both entertaining and bittersweet, the film paints a vivid portrait of contemporary Hong Kong, where family obligations and social expectations weigh heavily on everyday life.

The film celebrated its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this year.

Screenings

25 Sept, 18:00 – Kinokoni 3; 26 Sept, 15:30 – Kinokoni 2; 29 Sept, 20:00 – Corso 3

The artist Nina Chen is showing her first solo-exhibition 'Over Mountains, Across Seas' at Kunstraum Aarau until October 10, 2026. 

In her artistic practice, Nina Chen photography, installation and video. Through a precise observation of her surroundings, she explores the conditions of the present and reveals the tensions between individual experience and social transformation.

'Over Mountains, Across Seas' brings together works by Nina Chen that engage with migration, landscape and perception. Between documentary precision and poetic openness, her works create visual spaces where personal experiences intersect with questions of ecological and social change.

Nina Chen (*1980, Hubei, China) studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Hubei Normal University. She lived and worked in Shanghai until 2017 and is now based in Aargau, Switzerland.

The exhibition is curated by Roger Wirz (*1970), an artist, curator and co-director of Kunstraum Aarau, where he has been co-running the institution’s independent exhibition programme for contemporary art since 2015.

Location: Kunstraum Aarau, Ochsengässli 7, 5000 Aarau, Switzerland

You are invited for the exhibition 'Between Form and Use, Where Gestures Begin' of artist Xinyi Fox Hu at Art Resonance Gallery in Geneva from September 16th until October 15th.

With 'Between Form and Use, Where Gestures Begin', Xinyi Fox Hu transforms familiar objects—mirror and table—into evolving ceramic forms that invite the visitor to activate them. Looking at oneself, gathering, leaning: these everyday gestures are reconfigured, requiring the body to adapt and invent new ways of using them.

Ceramics occupies a singular place in contemporary art, oscillating between domestic object and sculptural form. This project turns this ambiguity into a strength by questioning the notion of use: is it a limitation or an opening? Xinyi’s works do not abandon function; they shift and reinvent it. The artwork emerges precisely through the body’s engagement, through the gestures that bring it into
existence.

The exhibition opens up a space of encounter between objects, bodies, and gestures. Visitors are invited to project themselves into these forms and imagine them within their own everyday lives. The works do not assert themselves as finished objects, but rather as starting points: they suggest possible relationships, ways of inhabiting space differently, and of recomposing the simplest gestures of everyday life.

Xinyi Fox Hu (b. 1992, Guangdong, China) is a visual artist working between France, Switzerland, and China. A graduate of HEAD – Genève (2022) and recipient of the Bruckner Foundation Grant (2023).

The exhibition is part of both Geneva Art Week 2026 and Parcours Céramique Carouge (PCC).

Date: September 16 until October 15 2026

Location: Art Resonance Gallery, Rue Rodolphe-Tœpffer 11, Geneva

Peter Kilchmann Gallery is showing the solo exhibition "Look at You" by Swiss artist Valentin Rilliet until October 17, 2026.

This exhibition brings together new paintings and works on paper that explore themes of life and death, transcendence, and spirituality. Ghostly figures, animated dolls, and fragmented bodies inhabit a world where the everyday merges with the supernatural.

Building on the personal mythology developed in his previous exhibition, The Dream Synopsys (2025), Rilliet continues to expand his distinctive visual language through elements of magical realism.

Drawing on imagery that spans art history and popular theatrical traditions—from Ferdinand Hodler to the Commedia dell'arte—Rilliet creates layered, open-ended narratives. Faces are concealed by hands, hair, or masks, while scenes remain deliberately incomplete, inviting viewers to imagine what lies beyond the visible. Through omission, ambiguity, and movement, his paintings evoke a mysterious world where multiple stories unfold simultaneously.

Valentin Rilliet (*1996, Geneva) lives and works in Zurich. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (2020) and obtained his MFA in Fine Arts at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (2023). In 2023 he was awarded the Yvonne-Lang Chardonnens Stiftung, and Pro Helvetia (artist residency in Chongqing, China), and the Swatch Peace Artist Residency. In the fall of 2024 the artist had his first solo show with Galerie Peter Kilchmann.

Location: Peter Kilchmann Gallery, Zahnradstrasse 21, 8005 Zurich

Galerie Urs Meile Zurich Beijing is pleased to present 'Horsehair takes a long time to burn', a solo exhibition by Swiss artist Rebekka Steiger at the Ankerstrasse gallery in Zurich.

Developed following a seven-month residency in Beijing, which concluded this March, the exhibition brings together a new group of paintings and, for the first time, six photographs. In these works animals, landscape, memory, and mortality merge into unstable, emotionally charged scenes.

Steiger has drawn inspiration from China and its culture since her first residency there in 2018. During her most recent stay, the horse - a recurring figure throughout her practice - took on renewed significance. Inspired by the Year of the Fire Horse, which began this past February, Steiger’s new works draw on its association with energy, independence, endurance, and loyalty, but also with restlessness and impulsiveness. Rather than making the horse a central point of reference, these qualities shape works in which different animals, landscapes, and remembered encounters offer ways to think about movement, vitality, and unruly force.

For this new body of work, Steiger has begun to sketch directly onto the canvas, adding sketchmarks in lumber crayon and, at times, coloured pencil alongside her established use of acrylic ink and tempera. She leaves parts of these initial marks visible, allowing lines to remain where they might conventionally be painted over. The resulting surfaces preserve the movement of looking and revising: outlines double back, forms are tested and adjusted, and painted passages sit beside more tentative traces. Rather than presenting an image as fixed or resolved, the works retain the uncertainty through which they came into being.

Rebekka Steiger (b. 1993, Zurich) is a Swiss artist whose vividly coloured works move fluidly between abstraction and figuration.

Dates: September 10, 6-8pm - October 31

Location: Galerie Urs Meile, Ankerstrasse 4, Zurich

The Kunstmuseum Basel invites you to the exhibit by Chinese artist Cao Fei until October 11th 2026.

Cao Fei (b. 1978, Guangzhou, lives in Beijing) is one of the defining voices of her generation, working across video, digital media, photography, installation, and sculpture. The artist’s works capture the rapid changes that have shaped China, and the Pearl River Delta in particular, since the country’s 1978 policy of Reform and Opening up.

For Cao Fei. Testimonies to the Near Future, her first solo exhibition in Switzerland and largest survey exhibition in Europe to date, the artist transforms the Kunstmuseum Basel | Gegenwart into a total work of art that takes the form of a city blending immersive installations and video universes from her oeuvre of the past thirty years. Cao Fei’s achievement as a pioneering creator of digital worlds is uncontested. Her early works have influenced an entire generation of artists from Asia and beyond. For over two decades, she has made art—from video installations and digital simulations to virtual-reality settings—grappling with the impact on human life of wrenching societal and technological transformations, establishing her renown as a leading thinker about art, media, technology, and the future.

The exhibition, which extends across all four floors of the Gegenwart building, invites viewers to delve deep into Cao Fei’s extensive oeuvre and makes for a singular experience in three dimensions in which the video works are not just on display but become an immersive reality. 

Location: Kunstmuseum Basel, St. Alban-Graben 8, Basel