DKU Arts and Humanities alumni Dongkun Ludwig Lyu and Siyu Sue Wang (Class of 2025), together with their collaborator Lingli Chen, recently inaugurated their co-curated exhibition, The Great Schism: An Archaeology of Apocalyptic Futures, at the Central Art Museum (CAM) in Hangzhou. The project was realized after they won the highly competitive 2025 “Emerging Curators Project” award.

This Sunday, September 14th, 2025, at 20:00, they will share their curatorial vision for the exhibition, as well as the processes and challenges involved in its conception and production.

All are welcome.

Zoom link: https://duke.zoom.us/j/7702757156

About the Exhibition:

In 2046, an incident known as “The Great Schism” cut all ties between Earth and the orbital space station. From that moment on, the two worlds evolved independently, each undergoing its own catastrophes and transformations. The space station developed into a self-sustaining, closed-loop society, while Earth plunged into ecological collapse and societal restructuring. Centuries later, the space station returns to Earth, embarking on a project of “archaeology of the future”—excavating the ruins left in the wake of capitalism’s demise and reinterpreting the human past, present, and future.

This exhibition conceived as a science fiction, in which visitors are protagonists in this novel, as archaeologists from the future, setting foot on an expedition and writing their own report on the future of archaeology, unfolds in two chapters, each focusing on the post-Severance trajectories of these two worlds:

Plural Futurisms in the Enclaves of Schism

The first chapter explores alternative futurisms that emerged from the past, situated within a utopian imaginary that diverges from dominant historical narratives.

In the aftermath of the Severance, the space station was cut off from Earth’s economic, cultural, and political infrastructures, entering a trajectory of autonomous development. Here, the logic of capitalist globalization, the continuity of colonial history, and even the very notion of the nation-state have all faded into ambiguity. This chapter showcases how futurist imaginaries developed across different regions—particularly in socialist contexts, the Global South, and formerly colonized nations—and how, in a post-Schism society, technology, ethics, and culture have been reshaped.

Future Archaeology of a Post-Apocalyptic Earth

The second chapter turns to a speculative sci-fi scenario that looks back from the future onto the past.

Upon returning to Earth, the archaeological team is confronted with a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The capitalist machine has ground to a halt, global supply chains have fractured into debris, and the structures of human society oscillate between dissolution and reformation. From an “archaeological” perspective, this chapter excavates the ruins of capitalism and the fault lines of contemporary social change. It asks how geontology—our ontology of the Earth—might be redefined amid this landscape of collapse, and whether the end of the Anthropocene signals the end of “the human,” or the emergence of a new form of subjectivity.