BEIJING.- Breakdown Playlist brings together works by sixteen artists from China and Switzerland. The exhibition is part of the 2025 cultural exchange projects commemorating the 75th anniversary of diplomatic relations between the two countries and grew out of the Embassy of Switzerland in China’s studios program. Beginning in August 2025, nine Swiss artists undertook residencies at six Chinese art institutions, namely in Beijing, Chongqing, Dehua, Yantai, Hangzhou, and Chengdu, creating new works based on local observations.
Under the guidance of Carol Yinghua Lu, Director of Beijing Inside-Out Art Museum, the exhibition was co-curated by young Swiss curator Clara Chavan and Inside-Out assistant curator Na Rongkun. Building on the selection of Swiss artists, they invited seven Chinese artists to participate, fostering a dialogue between emerging contemporary artists from both countries. This collaborative model reflects the museum's distinctive dedication to fostering international dialogue and offering singular educational experiences that challenge assumptions and transcend cultural boundaries.
Taking the exhibition-making process as their primary methodology, the curators held weekly meetings from March to October 2025, combining on- and offline studio visits with regular email exchanges. Through careful observation, partial perspectives, and subjective narratives, they embraced unforeseen encounters and surprising turns, allowing what was sometimes lost in translation to become integral part to their methodology. Discrepancies in how each group imagined the other’s environment also strongly shaped the conceptual development of the exhibition. The Swiss artists’ impressions of China included its rapidly developing AI and internet industries, its mature manufacturing supply chains, and the films of Jia Zhangke. These perspectives were somewhat one-sided, just as the Chinese artists imagination of Switzerland was full of snow-capped mountains, banks, and exquisite watches—a mountainous nation where resources are allocated slowly and gracefully, almost no different from how the ancients might have seen it: “the Peach Blossom Spring of the Western world,” as Xu Jiyu described it in 1849. These preconceived notions persistently influenced the curators’ conversations and proved impossible to dismiss.
The title Breakdown Playlist reflects their perception of our current reality: system time, personal time, and multiple identities increasingly intertwine, converging in subtle awkwardness. A "playlist" represents a person's habits and private tastes—fragments of our identities shared to understand and get closer to the other. It encompasses habitual resumes, portfolios, and social personas, echoing what sociologist Erving Goffman theorized in his 1956 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. These "playlists" help us integrate into society efficiently, but they can also limit our understanding of ourselves and the world, leading us to repeat fixed patterns of life. By rethinking the tastes that appear in the form of online collections, playlists, notes, and memos, and the personas they imply, we realize they have become too numerous to select consciously. Time is fragmented, spent inhabiting different identities, which in turn embeds us within larger social narratives. The choice of a "playlist" often depends on our environment and role. We are all the performers of our own "playlists." When we talk about ourselves, each person is constantly switching between different personas in different blocks of time. When not creating, we are tutors, writers, foreigners, chefs, and lovers. Through these transitions, the shape of cross-cultural collaboration in the wake of receding globalization is pieced together.
"Breakdown" references Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1956 eponymous novel: "The forces that terrify are no longer God, justice, or fate in the Fifth Symphony, but rather a traffic accident, a flood caused by a design flaw, a nuclear power plant explosion triggered by a laboratory operator's carelessness, or a wrongly calibrated incubator. Our path leads to this failure-prone world, to its dusty peripheries." In a world that strives for smooth operation, failure persists. Sometimes, a "breakdown" also comes from unpredictable accidents in the creative process. The artists' high expectations for the local supply chain led them to focus on creating installations and using specific crafts, which often could not be realized as anticipated. In this process, immense flexibility emerged—they repeatedly adjusted their plans, asked staff to communicate, and, when faced with uncertainty, maintained patience while questioning the necessity of their works. This moment of "breakdown" instead prompted the artists to re-evaluate the core of their practice, ultimately leading to the birth of more locally resonant proposals. Combining "playlist" and "breakdown" emphasizes a playful and constructive engagement with this reality: art can recombine existing elements, generating new narratives and prompting reflection on daily life. In the process, abstract differences fade, and concrete exchanges reveal distinctions in thought, fostering mutual understanding of artistic practice.
Through these moments of "breakdown," genuine exchanges emerge. Breakdown Playlist embodies an international collaboration that is decentralized, reflective, and attuned to the complexities of contemporary cross-cultural dialogue.
Artists: alfatih, Julian Burkhard, Timothée Calame, Chan Hau Chun, June Fischer, Mathis Gasser, Jess Lau Ching-wa, Liu Yuan, Lu Turtur, Melody Lu, Clara Roumégoux, Mina Squalli-Houssaïni, Wang Yuyan, Anaïs Wenger, Yang Di, Zhou Zhang
