In Li Qing’s work, the past is used as an open treasure chest to be explored, and history becomes a set of motifs. In this sense, its presence within Rong Zhai house echoes to a wider history of societal changes in Chinese society during the past centuries and especially in the past decades. Indeed, the history of Prada Rong Zhai is a palimpsest of Shanghai’s century-old history. In the last decades, the historical 1918 residence has been the private house of a national capitalist, a public property after socialization, before being restored to become a place dedicated to art. Such a place still carries the marks of the layers of different social conditions over time and the spirits of the different people and things it has hosted. Rear Windows—inspired by the eponymous movie—deals with the Hitchcockian concept, looking out to the outside world which is changing, evolving sometimes as a way of examining our own lives. The displays in the rooms are conceived as climatic scenes to experience the act of seeing and of being seen or observed. Through some of his emblematic series of works like his Neighbor’s Window and Tetris Window series (in which he borrows the trompe l’oeil technique combining old wooden window frames with the artworks of French and other colonial artists or new architecture behind glass, that become the cultural and artistic landmarks of the Chinese urban space now), Li Qing proposes references to the city of Shanghai (or even Hangzhou, where the artist lives) that has developed into an overlapping of different spaces and periods of time, an interlaced layer of old and new buildings and stories of different social groups. Li Qing has imagined Rong Zhai as a space still used by its residents or their contemporary ghosts. The artist recreates some of the key rooms, like the ballroom, the bedroom, the bathroom, and a karaoke room, where the presence of the former occupants is suggested through artistic gestures. As a narrative story conceived through a wide range of Li Qing’s past and recent works, the exhibition unfolds as in a movie set of a film whose action is about to come. As though belonging to an imaginary society that lives in its dreams, Li Qing initiates here another form of poetry in the Rong Zhai house but also within his own work, always questioning: how to be closer to the reality of things?