From August 2, 2025, to January 4, 2026
Curator: Virginia Roy

Sala Lola Álvarez Bravo

For thousands of years there has existed in China a literary genre known as zhiguai xiaoshuo, which might be translated as “tales of the uncanny.” The term refers to fantastical stories of strange and supernatural happenings that contain an extraordinary mixture of fiction and reality. This genre is the starting point of a recent project by artist Chantal Peñalosa Fong. The narratives of her creations unfold on the threshold between imagination and reality, in a state of tension between lived history and memories, halfway between a blurred past and the present moment. The stories of her works interweave experiences in which different time frames coexist and the faculty of memory shapes the present in order to give it new meaning.

In this exhibition, the artist has focused on the phenomenon of Chinese immigration to Mexico, drawing on the history of her own ancestors and personal family traumas, as well as the testimony of the hegemonic official version and the existence of a xenophobic discourse. Born in northern Mexico, Peñalosa explores in her work the frontier region as an interstitial place. Through poetic imagery, her works evoke the wounds and fragility of the border territory and the experiences of migration and exile that the frontier generates and invokes.

Through the representation of landscape and the inclusion of floral elements, Peñalosa emphasizes the notions of absence and forgetting, bringing out the uncanny quality that penetrates these places or that lies concealed within them. In the course of her exploration, the artist establishes correspondences, in an attempt to dialogue with different moments in time as well as with other living species. In the form of a portent, these love letters full of stories and images offer a clue to what is to come: a web of emotions and historical times interwoven with the possibility of a new vision of the past, but also ―and above all― an invitation to an encounter with the future.