“Next Cultural Producer” Season IV “Text and Art”

From July 16 to October 8, 2026, the “Next Cultural Producer” programme, co-initiated by the Power Station of Art (PSA) and the CHANEL Culture Fund, will present its fourth season, “Text and Art.” The winning proposal, Carrier Bags from the Peripherals, will unfold at psD within the Espace Gabrielle Chanel (third floor) of PSA. Following previous seasons dedicated to craft, architecture, and theater, this season interrogates how text—in both its broad and specific senses—operates as a creative language and conceptual model to permeate and activate breakthrough narratives within contemporary art and diverse cultural practices.

The newly selected “Next Cultural Producers,” Li Yalun and Qian Mengni, depart from two vital “texts” of everyday life—news reports and fictional writing—to examine the intricate relationships between text and art, and between the individual and the world. In their view, creative practices across journalism, literature, contemporary art, moving image, and architecture all possess an unparalleled sensitivity to glean the fragile, the soft, and the humorous from the peripherals of everyday life, while simultaneously reflecting or resisting various forms of invisible structural violence from diverse perspectives. By gathering these scattered fragments of the unspoken and the unspeakable, one may forge a connection between the self and the world—just as reading news reports allows one to break out of informational cocoons, and engaging with literature enables a departure from the limitations of personal experience.

Organized through the logic of the “carrier bag,” a theory proposed by the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, the exhibition rejects the hegemony of grand, linear narratives to instead accumulate fragments of the everyday, thereby inviting the audience to reflect on the power dynamics between the subject and object of narrative. An embracing structure, echoing the form of a “carrier bag,” divides the exhibition space into the interior and the periphery. The exhibition begins at the periphery, where an in-depth news report and a piece of fictional writing are presented in a scattered format upon the outer walls. These wooden structures form a folded, elliptical “carrier bag,” with its inner walls lined with soft felt, enclosing 31 works from the fields of contemporary art, architecture, literature, etc. The creative approaches employed by these works subtly resonate with the narratives of news reports and fictional writings: while the former select material from the real world to represent, analyze, and adapt, the latter depart from subjective experience to reveal, express, and articulate.

Throughout the exhibition, a series of public programs will unfold around the dual axes of text and art. In the opening roundtable, artists, filmmakers, architects, and writers with profound personal experiences relating to “texts” will be brought together to discuss the multiple trajectories through which text is transformed into artistic form. Using Kim Ae-ran’s novel Knife Marks to open a broader discussion, a special dialogue will question the resonance triggered by fictional writings that address complex social contradictions. In addition, the curators and participating artists will lead diverse public learning programs, guiding visitors to “collect from the peripherals” and enter the primary sites of artistic and textual practice to retrieve neglected voices and memories.