Written by Yiya Wang, Class of 2028
Feeling into Form: Art, Movement, and the Making of Empathy opened at Duke Kunshan University on August 28, 2026, alongside the HRC Fall Conference. Conceived and curated through Heritage Lab at Duke Kunshan University, the project was led by Professors Jung Choi and Kolleen Guy, with Honey (Bihui) Huang playing a key role in project coordination and production. The exhibition took place across several campus spaces, including HUM Space, the Beauty Salon, Academic Building media screens, and CCT.
Through contemporary art, the exhibition explored movement, displacement, memory, cultural translation, and empathy. Its title draws on Einfühlung, the aesthetic origin of the modern concept of empathy, meaning “feeling into.” At the center of the project was a question: how might encountering another person’s movement, memory, or loss through art change the way we see? As Jung Choi put it, “Through art, we wanted to ask how we might encounter experiences beyond our own—and how those encounters might change the way we see and allow us to ‘feel into’ the experiences of others.”
The project did more than represent migration, exile, violence, or cultural difference. Image, sound, material, movement, fragmentation, and repetition were used to create embodied encounters with experiences beyond our own. Participating artists included Maximiliano Amici, Mary Behrens, Sitian Cen, Lin Chen, JiYoon Chun, Mona Hatoum, Tae Eun Kim, Xiangdongqing Lai, Onthymos, and Ya-Lun Tao.
What began as a curatorial concept in February developed into a seven-month collaboration among faculty, artists, staff, and students. A nine-member student curatorial team, Jiawei Gu, Xinlan Shen, Yifei Xu, Shanyu Lin, Shwe Sin (Goldi), Yige Su, Nhu Anh Vu, Minshen Zeng, and Alexandra Aliu, took part in research, installation, archival work, music and performance, and exhibition production. The wider process also involved international artist communication, spatial and technical planning, and public programming. The exhibition concluded on September 15 with a performance by Maximiliano Amici.
