TRANSFORMATIVE STORYTELLING
In the final episode of our Wild Mythologies series, artists Dennis RedMoon Darkeem and Yiou Wang join 2025 Curatorial Fellow Jessica Holtaway for a conversation about storytelling as a transformative practice of care, connection, and consciousness. Together, they reflect on how personal, cultural, and ecological narratives can shift our awareness and deepen our relationships to the world around us.
Dennis RedMoon Darkeem shares insights into Patchwork Travelers (2022), a public installation commissioned by Art at Amtrak at Penn Station. Blending Indigenous and African diasporic motifs with sound and personal narrative, the work created a moment of pause and reflection for travelers at a major transit hub. Positioned at a site of constant movement, the piece acted as a portal—interrupting daily routine to invoke cultural memory and expanded presence.
Yiou Wang discusses their artistic approach to hydrofeminism and more-than-human storytelling. Wang’s work engages the elemental power of water as both a literal and symbolic force, inviting us to consider how bodies, landscapes, and mythologies are deeply entangled. Through fables and allegories, Wang explores water as a shapeshifting entity—at once vulnerable and resilient—that carries knowledge across generations and ecosystems.
Together, Darkeem and Wang explore storytelling as a practice that moves between worlds—human and non-human, personal and collective—opening space for care, transformation, and connection.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Dennis RedMoon Darkeem is a mixed media and multidimensional artist working across installation, photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, and performance. Drawing from his Indigenous Yamassee Yat’siminoli and African-American heritage, his work explores deep-rooted connections between people, history, land, and water.
Darkeem creates experiential environments that combine traditional craft, cultural symbolism, and storytelling to generate new narratives and spaces for reflection. His work emphasizes transformation, regeneration, and honor—building new communities that explore the complexities of identity and heritage. He is the founder of RedMoon Arts Movement, a platform for collaborative programs that elevate Indigenous, African-American, and other underrepresented voices.
His projects have been featured in public installations and exhibitions throughout the U.S., including Patchwork Travelers(2022), commissioned by Art at Amtrak at Penn Station. Through a layered aesthetic grounded in cultural memory and ancestral wisdom, Darkeem invites audiences into spaces of presence, listening, and connection.
Yiou Wang is a multimedia artist whose practice centers on multisensory storytelling and worldbuilding across physical and virtual realms. Blending real-time and animated 3D environments, characters, and motion-capture choreography, Wang develops immersive experiences that reflect biophilia and post-anthropocentric thinking—what they describe as “ancient future myth.” Their work envisions interconnected worlds where ritual, ecology, and technology converge.
With a background in both art and architecture, Wang moves fluidly across disciplines, creating interactive installations, holographic creatures, audiovisual performances, and speculative environments. They are the founding artistic director of Mixanthropy Studio, a multidisciplinary design platform that invites audiences into spatial experiences with ancestral animal deities and hybrid futures.
Their work has been exhibited and screened internationally at venues including BLANC Gallery, Torrance Art Museum, SXSW, SIGGRAPH, the MIT Museum, the Asian Media Arts Festival, and the New Museum of Networked Art. Wang has received numerous honors, including the Muse Gold Design Award, a S+T+ARTS Prize shortlist nomination, and a Red Dot Award.