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.

sinokultur would like to invite you to a tour with artist Nina Chen through her exhibition Over Mountains, Across Seas at Kunstraum Aarau on Saturday, September 19th at 2pm.

In her artistic practice, Nina Chen combines 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.

This project is part of sinokultur's cultural promotion program 2026.

The tour is held in English and German.

sinokultur tour w/artist: Sept 19 from 2 -4 pm, tickets click here

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

Wir von sinokultur würden euch sehr gerne zu unserem Salon On the Road mit chinesischer Literatur: Alice Grünfelder im Gespräch mit Übersetzerin Karin Betz am Dienstag, 29. September um 18.30 Uhr einladen.
 
Literatur aus der VR China, Taiwan und Hongkong ist vielfältig wie nie. Karin Betz hat in den vergangenen Jahren eine grosse Bandbreite von Autoren und Genres übersetzt und sich dabei literarisch an die geographischen und historischen Ränder der sinophonen Kultur begeben: mit Chi Zijians Roman Das letzte Viertel des Mondes zum Nomadenvolk der Ewenken, mit Wang Xiaobo in Das goldene Zeitalter ins Zwangsexil nach Süd-Yunnan, mit Sanmao in Geschichten aus der Sahara in die Westsahara von 1973 und mit Yang Shuang-zis Reise durch Taiwan im Jahr 1938 nach Taiwan in der japanischen Kolonialzeit. Im Gespräch mit Alice Grünfelder berichtet sie über ihre Entdeckungen durch chinesische Literatur im geopolitischen Spannungsfeld.
 
Karin Betz übersetzt chinesische und englische Literatur, ist Kulturvermittlerin, Dozentin, Moderatorin und DJ. Übersetzt hat sie u.a. Mo Yan, Liao Yiwu, Cixin Liu, Xi Xi, Jin Yong, Can Xue, Wang Xiaobo und Zhang Yueran. Für ihre Arbeit wurde sie mehrfach ausgezeichnet, u.a. mit der August-von-Schlegel Gastprofessur für die Poetik der Übersetzung an der FU Berlin 2020/21, dem Special Book Award of China und dem Helmut-M.-Braem-Übersetzerpreis 2024. 2025 war sie Writer in Residence an der Taiwan Literature Base Taipei.
 
Alice Grünfelder, Buchhändlerlehre und Studium der Sinologie und Germanistik in Berlin und China (Chengdu), bis 2010 Lektorin beim Unionsverlag in Zürich, Herausgeberin etlicher Asien-Anthologien. Mehrere Veröffentlichungen, u.a. die Road-Novel Wüstengängerin (2018) über Xinjiang, Wolken über Taiwan (Rotpunktverlag) stand auf der Hotlist der Unabhängigen Verlag. 2024 erschienen u.a. bei Hochroth Leipzig Übersetzungen von Lyrik aus Taiwan. 

Der Salon findet auf Deutsch statt.

Datum: Dienstag, 29. September 2026 von 18.30 bis 21 Uhr, Türöffnung um 18.15 Uhr

Ort: sinokultur, Klosbachstrasse 109, 8032 Zürich

Für Tickets hier clicken. 

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).

16 September, 4–8pm — Drinks & Preview, for Geneva Art Week
19 September, 11am–4pm — PCC Preview
20 September, 12–4pm — Talks at 11am & 4pm, by registration only.

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

Galerie Urs Meile Zurich Beijing is pleased to present 'Horsehair takes a long time to burn', a solo exhibition by Swiss artist Rebekka Steiger opening on September 10th from 6-8pm 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