Knowledge is myth: chimeric continuities features works by four artists and collectives Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien, Candice Lin, Cole Lu, and AYDO (Ayoung Yu & Nicholas Oh) that complicate the binaries of mythology and knowledge, and their constructs. The title Knowledge Is Myth plays off the phrase “knowledge is power,” popularized by Sir Francis Bacon in the late sixteenth century at the height of the European Enlightenment, globalization, and religious conflict. Drawing from diasporic as well as chimeric and hybrid subjectivities, these works reconfigure colonial hierarchies of being that separate human and nonhuman realms, while embracing what decolonial writers Walter Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh describe as an ecology of knowledge informed by non-Western epistemologies,1 carried through myths and the power of storytelling.2

Enzo Camacho & Ami Lien explore mythologies of truth, reason, and the common good as instruments of democracy, empire, and colonialism, highlighting agrarian resistance and postcolonial ecological legacies. waves move bile (2020), their pulsating light installation sculpted from foraged organic material, recreates a female chimeric folklore spirit (ahp) that haunts the region once known as French Indochina. Though traditionally a figure of otherness and suspicion, the artist duo embraces her as an uncanny spirit for understanding postcolonial and diasporic conditions of fracture and survival. Candice Lin’s multimedium work interrogates histories of science, colonialism, and diaspora by challenging socially constructed ideas of gender, sexuality, and autonomy. Lin’s series of works on paper from her 2015 exhibition, You are a spacious fluid sac, draws inspiration from an eclectic range of sources, including parasitic insects and scientist Lynn Margulis’s theory on coevolution, to critique Western notions of autonomy and power.

The works reimagine obsolete models of science to disrupt assumed categories of classification, while suggesting possible knowledges within new interspecies relationships. Cole Lu combines pyrography (drawing by fire), mythological storytelling, and autobiographical narrative to examine trans identity and longing. Lu examines established social hierarchies and their myth-making origins, such as Western folklore, where monsters are misunderstood, feared, and eternally othered from humans. In a new site-specific installation, the artist reimagines what it means to become monstrous, or more-than-human, throughout time as well as modes of display. Ayoung Yu and Nicholas Oh investigate chimeric, folkloric, and shamanic traditions through performance video and ceramic installations. Their new large-scale ceramic fountains and video work Fermented dreams (2026) center pre-colonial Korean performance rituals across eco-political and spiritual narratives across contested sites, such as the Korean DMZ, Jeju Island, Busan, U.S.–Mexico borderlands, and Hokkaido.

Knowledge is myth: chimeric continuities reflects on a paradoxical turn in history, when the very dualisms of knowledge and mythology break down: while modern myths that have justified colonial conceptions of the “human” versus “nonhuman,” the “primitive” and “subhuman,” and the “other” as knowledge are upturned, time-honored mythologies come to the fore that help us understand more vital ways of being in the world. A new wave of posthumanism draws upon such reciprocal and biocentric worldviews, or knowledges of “nature” that do not ostracize the spiritual or social. As critical humanities scholar Zakiyyah Iman Jackson asks in her seminal book Becoming human (2020), what does it mean to be homo-narrans, storytelling human, more than just homo-sapiens, thinking and reasoning human? Both bios and mythos?3 What does it mean to “know” but also to “not know”? With such questions in mind, Knowledge Is Myth also reflects on the practice of art as being radically irreducible to our “knowledge society,” where knowledge functions in service of social stratification, capital, and empire building, rather than as forms of open-ended inquiry.4

Situated within the context of a research institution that maintains the official motto veritas, Latin for “truth”, this exhibition draws on a selection of rare books, manuscripts, charts, and artworks across the university’s collections—from zoologist and physician Louis Agassiz’s research on polygenism, arts and sciences and museum display from the eighteenth-century, to ritual objects imbued with premodern cosmologies. Further text contributions from scholars and curators from Harvard and beyond, annotate an institutional archive of both epistemological and mythological proportions.

(This exhibition is organized by Danni Shen, Senior Curatorial & Public Programs Assistant)

Notes

1 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On decoloniality, “Epistemology: ‘World sense projected into storytelling and argument, coded, in every culture and/or civilization, as knowledge.’”
2 Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On decoloniality: concepts, analytics, praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 167.
3 Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world (New York: New York University Press, 2020), p. 34.
4 Tom Holert, Knowledge beside itself: contemporary art's epistemic politics (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2018), p. 24.