THE WORLD OF THE STAGE II

Yuan Gong Solo Exhibition

Exhibition Information

The World of the Stage II

Yuan Gong Solo Exhibition

Curator: Liliana Liao

Curatorial Advisor: Giuliana Benassi

Academic Chair: Delphine Valli, Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia

Palazzo Merulana, Rome, Italy

Opening: 2 October 2026

Exhibition dates: 3 October–1 November 2026

Rome, Italy — 2 October 2026 — The World of the Stage II, a solo exhibition by Yuan Gong, curated by Liliana Liao, with Giuliana Benassi as Curatorial Advisor and Delphine Valli of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia serving as Academic Chair, opens at Palazzo Merulana in Rome. On view until 1 November 2026, the exhibition constitutes the second chapter of The World of the Stage, a long-term curatorial and performative project initiated in Venice in June 2026 and conceived to continue across different cities, institutions, and social contexts. The first chapter established the “stage” not simply as a theatrical space, but as a structure through which bodies, institutions, architecture, media, and social relations construct and negotiate reality.

If The World of the Stage I asked how the world itself becomes a stage, The World of the Stage II moves the enquiry forward: who is permitted to enter that stage, who becomes visible, who is represented, and who determines its rules? Central to this second chapter is the tension between control and the relinquishing of control. Through this relationship, the exhibition addresses questions of migration, rights, shifting identity, belonging, and the continuing historical tensions between modernism and colonialism.

The exhibition begins with Documentation of Yuan Gong’s Artistic Practice, presented along a hallway at Palazzo Merulana. Past archival record materials trace more than two decades of artistic activity. Rather than forming a conventional retrospective chronology, the archive reveals recurring methods within Yuan Gong’s practice: intervention, occupation, participation, displacement, repetition, and bodily action. Documentation becomes not simply a record of something that has disappeared, but a means through which past actions are reactivated and placed into new relations.

The second section, Atmosphere as the Work Itself, is represented by Air Strike Around the World. Yuan Gong’s sustained exploration of air, fog, scent, gas, and other invisible substances moves artistic attention away from the autonomous object and toward the conditions through which space is physically and psychologically experienced. Fog alters visibility, reorganises bodily perception, and temporarily unsettles the relationship between viewer, artwork, and architecture. At Palazzo Merulana, Air Strike Around the World will be presented through projection, allowing its atmospheric qualities to extend into the exhibition space.

The Over-Rehearsed Body brings together Family Album, Chanted Ode, The Europe of Woman & Coronation, and Occupy the Safety Island. Across these works, the body appears as something continuously shaped by memory, ritual, language, social convention, historical narrative, and public space. “Rehearsal” is not limited to theatre: it describes the repetitions through which gestures, identities, behaviours, and social positions gradually become normalised. Yuan Gong interrupts, exaggerates, and relocates these structures, revealing the body simultaneously as a surface upon which social systems are written and as a site from which those systems may be challenged or destabilised.

At the conceptual centre of the exhibition is The Birth of the Jester, a long-duration performance project first initiated during The World of the Stage I in Venice, where Yuan Gong deliberately relinquished control over his own image by allowing participants to apply makeup and repeatedly transform his face. In Rome, the work develops into a wider investigation of migration, rights, identity, modernism, and colonial history. Yuan Gong’s face and body become an open interface upon which strangers and participants act. Authorship is redistributed, while questions of consent, power, visibility, and representation become part of the work itself.

The jester is neither a fixed character nor a costume. It is an unstable identity produced through encounter. The work asks who has the right to alter another person’s image, who possesses the authority to define identity, and what happens when that authority is deliberately surrendered. The Birth of the Jester will be performed live at Palazzo Merulana and at other significant sites in Rome, moving between institutional and public space. Through these actions, questions of migration and belonging, centre and periphery, inclusion and exclusion are brought into direct contact with the contemporary city.

The exhibition also presents China Scale, an important point of origin for Yuan Gong’s later research into atmosphere and invisible materials. Using carbon dioxide as both material and spatial intervention, the work connects measurement, environmental condition, bodily perception, and psychological pressure. First realised through repeated gas discharge and the numerical unit “314”, the work transforms invisible matter into a perceptible force acting upon space and the body.

Together, these five sections construct The World of the Stage II as a continuous performative field connecting archive, atmosphere, body, participation, and space. Rather than representing systems of power from a distance, Yuan Gong creates situations in which their effects are experienced through perception and bodily presence. In Rome, the stage becomes a site of negotiation between control and relinquished control, identity and representation, migration and belonging, modernity and colonial history. The museum opens toward the city, while the city itself becomes part of the stage.