Zero-waste exhibition design: applying multimodal anthropology to cross-cultural curation

Four artists produced original works in ceramics, drawing, sound, and mixed media for an exhibition at the Design Museum of Chicago. The artists worked from a Chinese-language ethnographic archive documenting the lives and craft practices of thangka painters in rural Tibet, compiled by co-author and art anthropologist Dongmei Liu over two decades of fieldwork. AI-generated translation drafts from Microsoft Copilot served as initial entry points into the source material. Drawing on Zhuang Kongshao’s zero-waste anthropology, this intervention argues that exhibition design can function as a site of ethnographic knowledge distribution, and proposes transmedial preservation as a concept for understanding how cultural knowledge survives medial transitions in curatorial practice.