Date: 30 March 2026 (Mon)
Time: 8:00pm – 9:30pm (Hong Kong Time)
Format: On Zoom
Speaker: Mia Yu (Artist and Art Historian)
Moderator: Yongwoo Lee (Assistant Professor in Cultural Studies, CUHK)
Registration: https://cloud.itsc.cuhk.edu.hk/mycuform/view.php?id=4185246
Films Screening:
Eme Cosmos (2024)
Amber (2024)
Abstract
Coined by geologist Dorothy Vitaliano in the 1960s, geomyth refers to traditional narratives rooted in observations of real geological phenomena, through which ancient cultures interpreted the earth’s deep time and planetary transformations. Today, large-scale extractive sites such as mines and hydroelectric dams operate as human-made geological events that reshape the earth’s crust and alter planetary rhythms at a monumental scale. Drawing on Mia Yu’s curatorial project Fossil Sunlight, Sedimentary Bodies and her experimental documentary Eme Cosmos (2024–2025), this presentation asks whether mega-extractive landscapes might generate new geomyths for the future. Yu’s research-based practice frames such sites not only as industrial zones, but as repositories of ancestral tales, erased histories, and latent myths. Centered on Asia’s largest open-pit mine in Fushun, Northeast China, Eme Cosmos reinterprets the pit as the womb of Eme, the Manchu earth goddess, who voices traumas and speculative futures inscribed upon her terrestrial body. Mia Yu’s talk proposes geomyth as a critical method to rethink infrastructure, cosmology, and care. It explores how critical mythmaking may serve as a “soft technology” for healing geo-trauma and imagining more sustainable, post-extractive futures.
About the speaker
Mia Yu is an artist, art historian, and curator working between Beijing and Paris. Her artistic practice is grounded in long-term research on large-scale infrastructures and extractive sites, exploring the complex entanglements between post-extractive landscapes, cosmology, and geopolitics within an Asian context. She is currently a visiting artistic researcher at the École normale supérieure in Paris.
This event is organized by the Master of Arts in Cultural Management Programme, CUHK.
Enquiry: haoqianyu@cuhk.edu.hk