Dust, ever-present yet seldom visible, shapes human health through systems of protection or neglect. Consider two extremes: in the controlled sterility of equestrian arenas, where tons of silica sand, precisely graded to 0.2–0.8mm, chemically bonded, and laser-raked, protect both horse and rider from respirable particles; and in industrial factories. There airborne sawdust invades workers’ lungs, a reality measured not against legal exposure limits (<1mg/m³ for respirable dust) but by kilograms accumulated over years. Where protocols are ignored, this neglect manifests as pneumoconiosis: a preventable lung disease where particles scar lung tissue, slowly suffocating its victims. Ruofan Chen’s Dust traces this divide, framing particulate matter as evidence of systemic failures.

Chen’s practice has long centered on chronic, invisible vulnerabilities, ecological, physical, emotional, that accumulate silently until reaching crisis. Dust emerged from her on-site production within Wuhan’s furniture factories, where 38°C heat and unventilated workshops revealed a brutal poetry: sunlight fracturing through dust-choked air, machines churning particulate clouds, workers breathing kilograms of sawdust per shift. Collecting industrial detritus, she transformed these neglected residues into tangible evidence of systemic erosion, making visible what society ignores. Witnessing her grandmother’s stroke, preceded by years of unmonitored vulnerability, framed her understanding of this insidious decay, personally grounding the systemic erosion that unfolds when vulnerabilities go unmonitored.

Conceived through collaboration with Shampoo, a collective grounding art in workers’ lived experience, the exhibition centers on a tilted wooden partition cleaving the gallery. Embedded within this structure, double-sided paintings, oil mixed with factory-collected dust on canvas and silk: nearly invisible on the light-facing side yet starkly textured in shadow, their particulate surfaces mirroring neglected labor. The partition’s factory-facing interior encloses a hazardous ecology, a scaffold-like armature supporting a silk screen onto which dust simulations are projected, fracturing light through particulate clouds while actual sawdust, wood scraps, and industrial debris coat the floor.

This physical dichotomy, the partitions facade up entering versus its hazardous enclosure, echoes society’s broader theater of selective safeguarding. Scaffolding, barricades, and plastic sheeting, touted as shields for safety, order, and aesthetics, engineer a stark divide: for citizens, they conceal dust and dissonance, preserving illusions of cleanliness and normalcy; for laborers, they entrap workers bodies in hazardous microclimates saturated with heat and respirable particles. These structures operate as spatial propaganda, prioritizing the image of the city over the lives that build it. By defining safety exclusively for the protected public while excluding those within the enclosure, protection becomes a social referendum on expendability, a hidden violence answering, daily, who merits shielding, and who inherits risk.

Text by Zachary Williams