This year, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel celebrates its 15th anniversary with a series of vivacious events to ignite sparks of creativity from artist to attendee and beyond. The artist residency program was launched by Swatch in 2011 in a repurposed grand hotel on the Bund in Shanghai, along the famed waterfront promenade and its Baroque-influenced architecture. Since its beginnings, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel has had freedom of expression and limitless creativity at its core, an extension of the watch brand’s adoration of art and design.
For its anniversary, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel is staging a yearlong series of exhibitions in cities around the world. At the moment, Flora Fantastica is on show in Venice until 26 July. A beautiful curation of artwork inspired by the natural meanderings and sculptural forms evoked by nature, it includes works by five artists in residence that honour the dreamy landscape of the Giardini Reali where the exhibition is being held.
Next up, from 16 July to 30 August, the Swatch Art Peace Hotel will go to the brand’s home in Biel, Switzerland with The Shanghai Vibe. There, a selection of art by 22 artists in residence will express their individual experiences of working and creating in Shanghai, from the stories to the energy and pace of the city that they’ve absorbed.
And later from 5 August, a film festival will be staged in Locarno, Italy featuring films by four different artists. The festival will be held at the BaseCamp, a converted ex-army base and home to a cohort of 150 budding artists between the ages of 18 and 30.
One of the cornerstone exhibitions of this anniversary, though, is fifteen X fifteen, a travelling art project staged as pop-ups in 15 different cities in China, with each edition presenting one of 15 of the Swatch Art Peace Hotel’s artists in residence. The core of fifteen X fifteen is an ongoing exchange of ideas and conversations between people and places, and encapsulates the Art Peace Hotel’s ethos, which has housed more than 600 artists from 61 different countries since its inception.
After earlier stops in Beijing, Chengdu, Hangzhou and Shanghai, the next edition will be held in Chongqing from 15 to 26 July, and feature the works of Tianzhuo Xie, who was an artist in residence in 2023. Xie’s practice in painting is fuelled by personal imagination, and draws on collected images, life experiences, and incidental texts.
Earlier in the year, the artist program kicked off its anniversary celebrations with the Art Journey 2026 exhibition, with works from 20 current and former artists in residence revolving around themes of alchemy, dance, water and light, and the power of women. “Celebrating 15 years of the Swatch Art Peace Hotel means celebrating the artists who have made it what it is today,” shared CEO Carlo Giordanetti in a press statement.
Alongside the curated artwork and highly anticipated exhibitions on show, the ground floor of the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai also plays host to a Swatch boutique, and boutiques of sister brands Omega and Longines. Should the creativity of the art whip up an appetite for more, Swatch launched early in the year a collaborative collection with the Guggenheim Collection featuring the works of Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Klee and Jackson Pollock.
Wonderfully vibrant and tastefully executed, the lineup of exhibitions and shows embodies the program’s spirit of innovation and creativity—leaving its traces and making its mark all over the world to mark its 15th anniversary.
Discover the Swatch Art Peace Hotel’s full schedule of events and exhibitions here.
