With Light, With Dust begins with a dialogue spanning half a century between Wang Lanruo and his son Wang Huangsheng, two generations of artists. Under the wheel of history, individual destinies often fluctuate unpredictably due to their insignificance. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, during a period of intense historical upheaval in Chinese society, some intellectuals were forced to relocate to remote areas, undertaking heavy and arduous labor. It was under these circumstances that Wang Lanruo was sent to the Yingde Sulfur Iron Mine in Guangdong. Life in the mining area was filled with high temperatures, dust, and exhaustion. Yet, amid the long and grueling labor and confusing political movements, he continued to record the people and scenes around him through sketches and essays, sustaining his observations and reflections as an artist. These drawings and writings, created on limited paper and under tough conditions, became his way of comforting and resisting the harsh circumstances. His sketches and notes not only documented the social and living realities of the time but also provided spiritual solace for his family and children. In his poem Yuebei Reflections: The Lonely Lamp he expressed this desolate yet resolute state of mind: "A lonely lamp, a dream of a thousand miles. Year's end startles the wanderer's heart. This form has has endured a hundred trials. An iron pestle ground down to a needle. Years of wandering drift by. Poverty and illness deepen each day. Tear stains, new mingling with old. Truth bitterly pursued. Right and wrong, who could bear to ask why? Wind and frost deliberately assail. Life's journey dwindles with a sigh. The bright moon shines on cold garments." These works are like a glimmer of light still flickering within the obscure dust, serving as footnotes to personal suffering and bearing witness to how the artist traversed the lows of fate.

More than half a century later, Wang Huangsheng repeatedly visited the mining area where his father had once worked, gazing anew upon this land that felt both weighted with history and expansively profound. The once bustling industrial scenes had transformed into a decommissioned and silent mining area, quiet and empty. The auditorium that frequently appeared in his father's sketches had turned into a village church and then into a restaurant—countless beginnings and endings in the mortal world, indifferent to the people who had vanished in between. These journeys moved him deeply and revealed a possibility to converse across time and space with his father and all the ill-fated intellectuals of that era. Over the course of six or seven years, he intermittently created the video work Father’s Pyrite Mine which presents this journey of tracing his father's footsteps, narrated in their hometown dialect to describe his discoveries and reflections. The large-scale installation in the exhibition features industrial mixers and conveyor belts, commonly found in mines, continuously churning ore sand and soil, within which shredded images, photographs, texts, and book pages roll. This endless rotation and agitation represent the absurdity and fragility of individual destinies within history. Throughout the museum's space, the dialogue between the works of the father and son artists blends with the low rumble and tumult of the mixers, echoing the silent traces of time in the sketches, photographs, and videos. In the turbulence of fate, art often resists darkness not with loud declarations but with a faint glimmer that coexists with the dust.

As Walter Benjamin passionately described in his Theses on the Philosophy of History, "Every generation is endowed with a weak messianic power to redeem the hopes of the previous generation." The “glimmer" in Mr. Wang Lanruo's works from this period also allows those of us, unable to remain untouched by the torrent of the times, to perceive another kind of transcendent power. With Light, With Dust does not emphasize the opposition between light and dust but describes a coexistence. The light never fully illuminates, nor does it ever completely vanish, the dust is the weight of fate, yet it is also the reality of existence. The juxtaposition of light and dust is not a conflict but a shared state of being. Even the shared life experiences of father and son cannot guarantee immunity from the absurdities and uncertainties of the world. Yet, how one retains their own glimmer of light is the hope that art bestows upon everyone.