Duke Kunshan University philosophy student Dongkun Lyu has reached a new career milestone by co-curating an exhibition featured in the prestigious China Shanghai International Art Festival.
Through a highly competitive national selection process, Lyu’s exhibition, titled Fictitious Trade: Duplicating Stories without Bartering, was chosen as the final showcase in the festival’s Rising Artists’ Works program.
Curated alongside Lingli Chen, Fictitious Trade reimagines the Silk Road’s cultural legacy in a contemporary context. Featuring works by six artists—Lihong Bai, Xinhao Cheng, Yixin Tong, Chenyu Mao, Yuling Qin, and Yuhang Wu—the exhibition unfolds in three thematic chapters. Old Crops and New Piastre and Regression and Approaching explore the trade route’s origins, examining the shifting meanings embedded in material transitions. Union of Botanists invites multi-sensory interactions and intersubjective effects with the flora, while Ethnography of Materials, Minstrels of Spirits uses multimedia to depict a transformative journey transcending anthropocentrism.
The China Shanghai International Arts Festival, a prominent event hosted by the Ministry of Culture and Tourism of China and organized by the Shanghai Municipal Government, is recognized as one of the largest state-level arts festivals in the country.
Building on this momentum, DKU’s dKunst Art on Campus program hosted Around the City with Her Camera: An Exhibition of Films by East Asian Women on November 3 and will host another on November 10. The two Sundays also include exciting double-bill screenings and live performances. On November 3, artist and filmmaker Luka Yuanyuan Yang presented her recent documentary Chinatown Chacha, joined by its protagonists, senior Asian American dancers now in their 70s and 80s. They performed several dancing numbers after the preview screening. On Nov. 10, artist He Zike will perform a lecture exploring her family’s history, spanning 20th-century China from cosmopolitan Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s to the hinterlands of Guizhou via colonial Hong Kong.
dKunst Art on Campus is curated by DKU’s director of art, Professor Zairong Xiang. Collaborating closely with the Division of Arts and Humanities and the Humanities Research Center at DKU, and widely with art institutions and colleges outside DKU, dKunst runs an artist-in-residence program, exhibition and non-exhibition art events, as well as the screen-exhibition in the AB lobby, and many other activities in order to foster a critically engaged artistic ecosystem on campus and beyond. Previous collaborations include the 14th Shanghai Biennale, the 2021 Guangzhou Image Biennale, the WCSCD Curatorial Project, the CAC://DKU Fellowship, and many others.
