Museum of what will have been — Yejia Sun — Rhino Fest 2026
What will the future remember of us — and what will it get wrong?
This performance invites audiences into a fictional museum from an unspecified future, where a team of archaeologists from the future, in this case, you, excavate the ordinary artifacts of Asian daily life in the early 21st century. Guided by a museum voice of total, unearned confidence, you'll dig, classify, and label these fragments like the museums before them, which were never built to see the faces they claim to archive.
Drawing on Fredric Jameson's "archaeology of the future," Douglas Crimp's writing on museums, and mockumentary lineages from Hito Steyerl to Andrea Fraser, scholar-artists Yejia Sun and Jintong Yang ask: is preservation ever separable from erasure? And can we imagine a future — or only recalculate the past?
Artists:
Yejia Sun is a dramaturg and artist-scholar from China. She holds an MFA in Dramaturgy from Columbia University and is currently a PhD student in Performance Studies at Northwestern University. In the United States, her dramaturgical and creative work has been presented at National Sawdust, JACK, and the Rhinoceros Theater Festival. In China, her dramaturgical works appear in Goethe Institute, Young Theatre, Shekou Theatre Festival, among others. Her writing has appeared in Theatre Journal, Asian Theatre Journal, Critical Stages, HowlRound, Ying Ming Theatre Magazine, and China Writer. Her honors include the Davis Peace Prize, the Lisa Lu Fellowship, the A4 Foundation WCWD Fellowship, and a finalist selection for the Elliott Hayes Award from the Literary Managers and Dramaturgs of the Americas (LMDA). www.yejiasun.com
Jintong Yang is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher working at the intersection of HCI and time-based media art. She explores how computational systems can support more intuitive and embodied forms of expression. Drawing on a background in motion and interactive design, her work bridges digital and physical processes to create experiences that deepen both aesthetic engagement and understanding, across animation, live performance, and installation. She holds an MFA in Computer Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Media Arts and Technology at UC Santa Barbara.
Dates: Saturday, October 10 at 3:00pm
Saturday, October 17 at 3:00pm
Saturday, October 24 at 3:00pm
Venue: The Labyrinth Club, 3658 N. Pulaski
Tickets: All Rhino Fest tickets are offered at sliding scale prices in an effort to make theater more accessible to more people in our communities. We say "pay what you can" and we mean it. Rhino Fest is co-produced by the Curious Theatre Branch and the performance venues. Additional donations are always welcome.
About the venue: The Labyrinth Club is located at 3658 N Pulaski Ave, just north of Addison in the Irving Park neighborhood. Street parking is usually possible nearby. The venue is 0.5 miles south of the Irving Park Blue Line station, and 0.2 miles west of the Addison Blue Line station. Labyrinth Arts is a first-floor space with an accessible entrance, no stairs, and one single-stall restroom; the restroom doorway is slightly smaller than ADA standard, and may be difficult for some wheelchairs to navigate.
Note: Labyrinth is structured as a private club rather than a public venue. Visitors will be asked to sign a guestbook on entering, which confers a 24-hour membership at the club. There is no extra fee due at the time of ticket purchase or on arrival. For more information: https://www.instagram.com/labyrinthartsperformance/
About Rhino Fest: The event that became the Rhinoceros Theater Festival began in 1988 as an offshoot of the Bucktown Arts Fest, and in its first year featured just two days of performances, including work by Jenny Magnus and Beau O'Reilly. When the event's founder moved away from Chicago in 1990, he asked a ragtag group of local artists (including Beau O'Reilly and Theatre of the Reconstruction’s Scott Turner) to keep the festival going, and the Rhino Fest was born. The Curious Theatre Branch went on to produce the Rhino across many neighborhoods and venues over the years, with events variously taking place in Wicker Park/Bucktown, Rogers Park, Andersonville and Avondale; at spaces including the Lunar Cabaret and Full Moon Café, the Neo-Futurarium, the Society for New Things, The Garage, The Firehouse, Remains Theatre, and Prop Thtr. In the mid-2000s, Rhino Fest settled at Prop Thtr in Avondale as its long-term base, and Prop and Curious co-produced the festival among a shifting group of curators for many years. Following the closure of Prop's Elston Avenue space in 2020 and a year off during the height of the pandemic, Rhino Fest is once more itinerant, currently producing more than 30 shows at The Labyrinth Club, Chicago Danztheater, and Chicago Dramatists.
Location
The Labyrinth Club, 60641