The Fabric of the City exhibition set up in the Cielo Space of Villa Malpensata presents the work of the Chinese artist Zhang Hong Mei (b. 1973) through over thirty works, including paintings and sculptures from her most recent artistic production, many of which are being exhibited to the public for the first time.

Throughout her twenty-year career, Zhang Hong Mei has dedicated herself to experimenting with various languages: from painting to performance, through sculpture, video art, and environmental installations. Following her acute sensitivity, she has been able to rework traditional painting techniques in a modern key, carving out a unique space in the landscape of contemporary Chinese art. Her stylistic signature is the result of the intersection of two important elements: on one hand, a passion for textile design, which was the focus of her academic training started in China and continued in Italy; on the other hand, the connection with the practice of paper-cutting, the traditional paper cutting, rooted both in her personal memory and in the history of Chinese folk art.

The title of the exhibition curated by Massimiliano Vitali, researcher at MUSEC, alludes to the fabric, the preferred material of Zhang Hog Mei's creations, and to the urbanistic and sociological concept of urban and social stratification of cities. Behind the intricate textile compositions of the City series, the heart of the exhibition project, lie the reflections and feelings generated in Zhang Hong Mei by the daily experience of the large Chinese metropolises. In the paintings presented in Lugano, fragments of red, yellow, green, blue, or black fabric, meticulously cut and glued according to sophisticated compositional projects, reassemble in the eyes of the observer into dizzying urban visions.