If the Object Could Run: Fugitivity, Activation, and Speculative Restitution in African–Asian Dialogues

In 2024, Tsinghua University Art Museum hosted African Art: A New Rediscovery, an exhibition of over 200 African sculptures and bronzes from a private Chinese collection. While diplomatically framed as a gesture of cultural engagement, the exhibition reproduced familiar asymmetries: the narrative was shaped by Chinese collectors and curators, with little acknowledgment of African artists, scholars, or the histories of displacement embedded in the objects themselves.

This presentation does not treat the Tsinghua exhibition as its main focus, but rather as a critical departure point for rethinking broader epistemic tensions around how African objects are either activated or silenced within global—specifically South-South—discourses. Beyond critiquing Chinese museums’ limited reckoning with their own forms of coloniality, I turn to two recent cultural works—the viral Chinese micro-drama Escape from the British Museum (2023) and Mati Diop’s film Dahomey (2024)—to explore curatorial forms through which decolonizing the museum might be imagined. Both works center on moments of spectral activation, in which museum-held objects speak, flee, or resist containment. In Escape, a jade teapot transforms into a young Chinese woman who escapes the British Museum in search of home. In Dahomey, looted royal artifacts return to Benin, voicing their ambivalence about what it means to be “home.”

By reading these narratives together, I explore what it means to imagine restitution not as institutional return, but as speculative fugitivity—where objects refuse their scripted roles and seek new relational futures. I propose fugitivity as a curatorial practice that privileges instability, longing, and disobedience over the fixity and closure so often found in museum narratives. Within the context of African–Asian cultural entanglements, this framework invites us to approach restitution not as a linear resolution, but as an open-ended process—shaped by desire, refusal, and the possibility of reactivation.