This exhibition will be on view from October 1 to December 13, 2026.
Knowledge is Myth: Chimeric Continuities
Knowledge is Myth: Chimeric Continuities
October 1—December 13, 2026
Opening Reception: Thursday, October 1, 2026
6:00–9:00 pm
Knowledge is Myth: Chimeric Continuities features work by artists and collectives Ami Lien & Enzo Camacho, Candice Lin, Cole Lu, and Ayoung Yu & Nicholas Oh that engage languages of mythmaking as a means of knowledge-making and unmaking, while questioning what constitutes “mythology” (including modern myths) in the formation of history and archives. Drawing from pre-colonial, pre-humanistic, diasporic, and often chimeric modes of knowledge production, these works reconfigure canonical hierarchies of being that separate human and so-called “nonhuman” subjects, realms, and alter-lives. As critical humanities scholar Zikkayah Iman Jackson asks in Becoming Human what does it mean to be homo-narrans (storytelling human) more than just homo-sapiens (thinking/reasoning human)? Knowledge is Myth: Chimeric Continuities further excavates various archives, rare books, manuscripts, and artworks from across Harvard, an institution of both knowledge production and of mythological proportions.
This exhibition is organized by Danni Shen, Senior Curatorial and Public Programs Assistant.
Funding is provided by the Harvard University Committee on the Arts (HUCA). Generous support for Carpenter Center programming is provided by the Friends of the Carpenter Center. Special thanks to the Harvard Art Museums.
A schedule of associated public programs will be announced in May.
About the Artists
Ami Lien & Enzo Camacho explore mythologies of truth, reason, and the common good as instruments of democracy, empire, and colonialism, highlighting agrarian resistance and postcolonial ecological legacies. Their pulsating light installation Waves Move Bile recreates a female chimeric folklore spirit (ahp) that haunts the region once known as French Indochina. Though traditionally a figure of otherness and suspicion, for the artists she is also an uncanny tool for understanding postcolonial, as well as diasporic, conditions of fracture and survival.
Candice Lin interrogates histories of science, colonialism, and diaspora, using multimedium work to challenge socially constructed ideas of gender, sexuality, and autonomy. A series of prints draws inspiration from parasitic insects, Jesus’s vagina, and scientist Lynn Margulis’s theory on coevolution as a way to critique Western notions of autonomy and power. The works also reference and reimagine obsolete models of science to disrupt assumed categories of classification and suggest what knowledge might be possible within new, intertwined relationships.
Cole Lu combines pyrography (drawing by fire), mythological storytelling, and autobiographical narrative to examine trans identity, interspecies kinship, and longing. New works by Lu examine established social hierarchies and their myth-making origins, such as Western folklore, where monsters are misunderstood, feared, and eternally othered from humans. In his latest body of work, Cole Lu reimagines myths of monstrosity into a new speculative fiction.
Ayoung Yu & Nicholas Oh investigate chimeric, folkloric, and shamanic traditions through large-scale performance video and ceramic installations. Their new large-scale ceramic fountains and two-channel video Fermented Dreams come together to center around precolonial Korean performance rituals that further explore a continuum of eco-politics and spiritual narratives across contested sites such as the Korean DMZ, Jeju Island, Busan, U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and Hokkaido.
Archive
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