Join us for a conversation on the exhibition Cosmos Falling, led by curator Danni Shen, with Madison Brown, John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Harvard Art Museums, and Eugene Wang, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art.

COSMOS FALLING

February 5—April 5, 2026
AUX: Intermedia Gallery, Level-1

Cosmos Falling includes works by Xin Liu, (The White Stone, 2021); Lawrence Lek (Geomancer, 2017); Yuyan Wang (The Moon Also Rises, 2023); and Angela Su (Cosmic Call, 2019), which employ pseudo-documentary and speculative fiction as filmic techniques to re-animate the afterlives of technical objects, while also questioning an aesthetics of failure that surrounds the cosmic, technological frontier. From missiles, rockets, comets, satellites, to artificial moons, each narrates what has been left in their wake and what emerges in the terrestrial ruin. Bordering on science fiction with Sinofuturist underpinnings that push beyond cyberpunk tropes, these works also enact a kind of embodied performativity between various bodies and subjectivities that reflect a reverse trajectory: falling from the heavens, cosmic frontier, lower orbit, sky, back to earth.

Cosmos Falling is curated by Danni Shen, Senior Curatorial Assistant, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University. A gallery guide accompanying the exhibition features a commissioned essay by Yutong Shi, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Contemporary Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

SPEAKERS

MADISON BROWN is a writer and curator who specializes in the history and theory of vernacular media cultures. Situated at the intersection of photo archives and everyday life, her work explores the politics of visual culture through questions of memory, absence, and power differentials. Madison received her Ph.D. in Screen Cultures from Northwestern University and is currently the John R. and Barbara Robinson Family Curatorial Fellow in Photography at the Harvard Art Museums.

EUGENE WANG is the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Professor of Asian Art at Harvard University, where he holds positions in History of Art and Architecture, Archaeology, Study of Religion, TDM (Theater, Dance, and Medium), and Inner Asia and Altaic Studies. A 2005 Guggenheim Fellow, he is the art history editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004). His research covers Asian Buddhist art as well as Chinese art history. His book, Shaping the Lotus Sutra: Buddhist Visual Culture in Medieval China (2005), on art of worldmaking, received the Sakamoto Nichijin Academic Achievement Award from Japan. He was twice recognized in recent years by the FAS Dean’s Fund for Promising Scholarship. He is the founding director of Harvard CAMLab dedicated to turning cultural-historical knowledge into medial-sensorial experience. The exhibition he curated in 2024, Mawangdui: Art of Life, at the Hunan Museum, won the 2025 iF Design Award from Germany.

Event Information

• Free and open to the public
• March 5 (Thu)
• 6:00 – 7:30 PM ET
• This is an in-person event.

Please note

No RSVP required.
Admission is free and open to the public.