until 08.05. | #4995ARTatBerlin | Migrant Bird Space shows at 28. March 2026 the exibition “UNSORTED CHAPTERS” by the artist Xia Peng.
Opening 28 March 2026, Migrant Bird Space presents Unsorted Chapters, a solo exhibition by Xia Peng featuring new paintings in acrylic, including works on found objects. Developed closely with the artist, the show brings together large mythological canvases and intimate works painted onto flattened cardboard boxes, secondhand book covers, and record sleeves — surfaces that carry the weight of other lives and other uses.
Trained in ink painting at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing before studying in Kassel, Xia Peng has spent over a decade in Berlin working between two pictorial traditions that understand space, time, and incompleteness in fundamentally different ways. This exhibition is his most experimental to date.
The works do not resolve their contradictions. Figures surface through layers of paint and recede before the eye can locate them. Mythological subjects are named and then withheld. Found objects interrupt the image from beneath. Across all of it runs a single condition: what it means to keep working within forms that have quietly shifted and can no longer be fully relied upon. At a moment when certainty feels increasingly scarce, Unsorted Chapters offers the experience of staying inside ambiguity.
Xia Peng (b. 1975, Tianjin) is a painter working between Chinese ink tradition and Western oil painting. He trained in ink painting at CAFA in Beijing before studying painting at Kunsthochschule Kassel, and has lived and worked in Berlin since the early 2010s. His practice moves across large-scale figurative canvases, landscape painting, and works made on found objects including cardboard packaging and secondhand books. Recurring across his work are mythological and religious fragments, layered surfaces built through cycles of covering and repainting, and a sustained interest in what happens when two pictorial traditions occupy the same ground without either one winning. His exhibitions include solo shows at Migrant Bird Space, Berlin, Kunstraum Nürnberg, and Galerie Rasch, Kassel, among others.
Opening: Saturday, 28. March at 6pm
Events Dates: Saturday, 28. March 2026 to Friday 08. May 2026
To the galery
Image Caption: Venus (2026) by Xia Peng
Exhibition Xia Peng – Migrant Bird Space | Zeitgenössische Kunst in Berlin | Contemporary Art | Exhibitions Berlin Galleries | ART at Berlin
