Silent Detonation
Exhibition Overview
In April 2026, Churan Wang returned to his hometown of Anshan, China, and held an exhibition with himself as its sole audience inside an abandoned factory where his father had once worked. This was not a performance, but a forced monologue — his hometown had given him too much that he could neither fully understand nor turn away from: the sparks of molten iron from his childhood, the silence of the generation before him, and the roar of that steel city buried deep in his bloodstream. Like someone unable to stop speaking, he has come to see artistic creation as a process of compressing layers of history and childhood experience, allowing them to gradually settle into material traces.
On 10 May 2026, this singular memory was reopened at Roundabout Art Center. Not as a reconstruction, but as a parallel temporality, bringing the young man who once stood alone before canvases, flames and ruins into encounter with the gaze of a wider audience.
Spanning painting, installation and video documentation of performance, the exhibition brings together a body of work that moves from the faces in Portraits of The Memory to The Burning Negotiation; from the personal predicament condensed through a child's perspective in A Lifetime at Twenty-Five, to the absolute sanctuary of the mind constructed through scattered perspective in The Cave.
Each work carries the reverberations of Anshan: the scars of colonial plunder, the cost of industrialisation's triumphant march, the depletion of resources, and the traumas passed down through generations. When the factory becomes a cave, and the monologue enters the exhibition space, the exhibition that once had only one spectator now opens itself to everyone willing to gaze into the abyss.
Installation View
Exhibition Opening
Centre: Li Xianting, renowned art critic and curator, and a key figure in Chinese contemporary art.
Centre: Jin Changjiang, Associate Dean of Teaching at the School of Architectural Art and Design, Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts; Associate Professor at Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts; and Director of LAFA Art Museum.
From left to right: Liu Dahai, Executive Director of Roundabout Art Center; Wang Yanyun, Curator; Churan Wang, Artist; Agustín Alepuz Morales, Academic Moderator.
Public Discussion
Theme: Translation as a Research Method in Literature and Art
Following the opening of the exhibition, the four principal contributors, together with members of the audience, engaged in a discussion centred on “Translation as a Research Method in Literature and Art.” Bringing literary translation, curatorial practice, artistic creation and the operation of art institutions into a shared context, the conversation explored the ways in which translation functions beyond the mere transfer of language.
Beginning with Agustín Alepuz Morales's proposition that “translation is a struggle with the original text and one's mother tongue,” the discussion examined translation as an ongoing process of negotiation between the author's intentions, the limitations of language, cultural differences, readers' expectations and structures of power.
These questions were then extended into the field of art. How does a producer transform an artist's private language into a public experience and institutional action? How can a curator construct an exhibition narrative that invites audiences in without diminishing the complexity of the works? And how do artists translate space, memory, trauma, materials and embodied experience into painting, installation and performance?
Taking “the sensitivity of a poet” and “the precision of an engineer” as guiding threads, the discussion further explored the dual identities shared by translators, curators, art centres and artists. On the one hand, their work demands intuition, sensitivity, poetic sensibility and a willingness to preserve what resists translation. On the other, it relies on structure, order, technique, execution and precise judgement.
Ultimately, the conversation considered how translation can serve as a method for understanding the relationships between literature, art and reality. Translation is both an act of arrival and one that inevitably entails loss; it is at once an act of communication and an act of reinvention.
