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.

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.

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