Phoenix 2025. Designed by Dave Kim, Executed by Curious Works.(Photo – USC Pacific Asia Museum)
From December 30, 2025, through January 4, 2026, the public is invited to preview the upcoming major art exhibit: Mythical Creatures – The Stories We Carry at USC Pacific Asia Museum, 46 North Los Robles Avenue in Pasadena. Set in the heart of downtown Pasadena, the museum is well-positioned to provide a quiet, thoughtful respite for the city’s Rose Bowl visitors and area residents alike amid the city’s festivities. *NOTE: Closed Wednesday, December 31 and Thursday, January 1.
By Melanie Hooks
The exhibit invites visitors on a journey through the immigrant experiences via the visual language of mythology. The museum welcomes guests Wednesdays – Sundays, 11:00 am – 5:00 pm.
From USC Pacific Asia Museum:
Conceived by Los Angeles-based Korean American artist and muralist Dave Young Kim, the museum-wide installation, itself a work of immersive art, marks a bold shift in how USC PAM’s historical collections can be activated to tell emotionally resonant, present-day stories.
A major exhibition that transforms USC Pacific Asia Museum into an immersive journey through myth and the immigrant story, Mythical Creatures: The Stories We Carry is sweeping in scale and deeply personal in tone, its narrative written in verse in a voice evocative of a wise elder to a loved one. The exhibition draws approximately 100 objects from USC PAM’s significant collection—which spans more than 5,000 years and includes art from East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, and the Pacific Islands and their diasporas— blending them with new media technology and works by more than 20 contemporary artists, including several commissions. The result is an interdisciplinary experience in which visitors engage with the past not only through didactic explanation, but through creative activations of pan-Asian mythology that ignite feeling and memory.
Contemporary artists represented include Dinh Q. Lê, Lily Honglei, Wendy Park, Momoko Schafer, Kyungmi Shin, Sanjay Vora, and Lauren YS.
In Mythical Creatures, visitors move through various creative environments, including a shadowy night crossing filled with demons, a homey rendition of an immigrant’s first apartment, and a gilded room spotlighting a gold Jin Chan frog that dispenses coins. Dragons, cranes, guardian spirits, and shapeshifters appear throughout as metaphors for internal states and intergenerational legacies.
New technologies power immersive experiences throughout the galleries, from a wraparound video installation in a reconstructed airplane cabin to an AI video interaction that lets visitors assume the role of an immigrant.
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