The winners of the "New Culture Producers" Season 4 "Text and Art" are announced.

April 17, 2026 - The Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art and the Chanel Foundation today jointly announced that Li Yalun and Qian Mengni have been selected as the winners of the fourth season of the "New Culture Producers" project, "Text and Art". Their selected proposal, "Collecting from the Margins", will be unveiled as an exhibition at the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art later this year.

The “New Culture Producers” project was jointly launched by the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art and the Chanel Cultural Foundation in 2021. It aims to provide a comprehensive platform for explorers, creators, practitioners and steadfasts with a cultural vision to showcase and express themselves.

This season's jury consists of Marie Schleef, Chanel NEXT Prize winner and theater director; Kitty Scott, chief curator of the 15th Shanghai Biennale; artist Shen Yuan; artist Wang Jianwei; and Gong Yan, director of the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art.

Mary Schlöff stated, “Collecting from the Margins offers a perspective on this turbulent, conflict-ridden, noisy, and busy world, allowing us to contemplate the inherent oppression within traditional clan-based social structures in a quiet and reflective manner. The exhibition uses the tension between fact and fiction, text and art as its framework and starting point to explore the unspoken and unspeakable aspects of everyday life. Li Yalen and Qian Mengni, grounded in solid theoretical methods and drawing upon their respective backgrounds in architecture and journalism, presented unique ideas in this highly persuasive exhibition proposal, thus becoming the winners of the fourth season of ‘New Culture Producers.’”

Katie Scott stated, “Inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘bag’ theory, the two curators conceived the exhibition proposal ‘Collecting from the Margins.’ This proposal brings together fragmented pieces of the unspeakable and unspoken from news and fiction, unfolding through two sections: text and art. Through this perspective, the two curators raise the question: In contemporary society, who has the right to speak, to give meaning, and to shape public narratives?”

Shen Yuan stated, "Li Yalun and Qian Mengni's plan has a clear concept: combining news, fiction, and art. News reports events with 'truth,' fiction describes events with 'fiction,' and art provides a space for people to engage with and read about events. The margins often go unnoticed, but they bring people closer to the center of the truth..."

Wang Jianwei stated: "Collecting from the Edge" approaches the issue from the perspective that our reading of the world becomes a problem. That is, when the world is all text, how do we obtain our understanding of the world from the unspeakable and unspoken things?

Therefore, the true edge is the unconnected world excluded from our cognition, those things that cannot be exhausted by any kind of connection. Or, in other words, is there some phenomenon in our accepted history that is not accepted by history?

Using the "carrying bag" as a display method is not merely a construction approach, but also a metaphor: those existing, unnoticed, and unspoken things also exist within every potential viewer. Every person has an unspeakable part within them.

Selected Plan

Collecting from the Edge

Both news reports and fictional literature, two important "texts" in daily life, require professional preliminary work (interviewing, collecting materials, weaving and writing) and post-production work (editing, typesetting, publishing). Reading news reports aims to break out of the information cocoon and see the distance and the outside world; reading literature aims to break out of personal experience and see the hearts of others. Reading the world is about collecting scattered "unspeakable" and "unspoken" things and weaving them into a connection between the self and the world.

Various texts, such as Ursula K. Le Guin's "Carrying Bag," reject the dominance of grand narratives and instead accumulate fragments of daily life. Creations such as journalism, literature, contemporary art, film, and architecture can collect fragility, tenderness, and humor from the margins of daily life with unparalleled sensitivity, while also reflecting or resisting a kind of invisible structural violence from different angles.

Rather than trying to resolve the tension between text and art, we might as well push it to two extremes. Through this exhibition, we hope to engage the audience in reflection: Where does the power of narrative come from? Who gives meaning to real-world events? Who holds the power of discourse? Why redistribute details and make them public? Who is committing unintentional violence? And what can you and I do besides point fingers?

New Culture Producer

Li Yalun, Qian Mengni

Li Yalun

Born in Beijing in 1995, she is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at the American University of Dubai (AUD). She is the co-founder of Dunes Workshop and Y+Y Studio. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, UCCA Edge "Touch Project II: Intimate Infinity," and the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, among others. She focuses on the disparity and instability in contemporary society and daily life, exploring how space and the material world shape and reshape individual and group identities. Her research and critical articles have appeared in publications such as *Time + Architecture*, *The Architect*, *Urban China*, *Duku*, and *CBN Weekly*.

Lee Ya-lun graduated from Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) with a Master of Architecture (M.Arch II) degree. Prior to that, she received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University with a minor in philosophy.

Qian Mengni

Born in Huainan, Anhui Province in 1987, she currently resides in Shanghai. She worked as a cultural journalist for many years, and spent two years at the Beijing Intermedia Art Museum, where she was involved in exhibition curation and publication editing. She currently works at the UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, where she is responsible for the Public Practice Department. Exhibitions she has participated in or independently curated include "Tentacle Project I: Wandering into the Unknown," "Tentacle Project II: Intimate Infinity," "Millennium Walk," "Unable to Resist Turning Around," and "Wilderness in the Woods: Revisiting the Practice of Fake Magazines."

In addition, she has curated and organized a series of public practice projects related to several large-scale exhibitions. She has long focused on everyday resistance, urban space, and feminist issues in contemporary art and the broader cultural sphere, and her reviews and interviews have been published in *First Financial Daily*, *Bishan*, *Xinrui Weekly*, Art Forum China, ING, Qilu, and Universal Handbook, among others. She holds a Master's degree in Communication Studies and a Bachelor's degree in Economics.