Future Ancestor: Seeded Mythologies from the Adoptee Diaspora is a collaborative storytelling and visual ritual project created by Chinese adoptee artists Eva Lin Fahey and Madeleine Conover. The event at Pao Arts Center on June 13th 2026, brought the Chinese adoptee community together around the themes of mythology, food, memory, and belonging—uplifting adoptee voices as part of a living, evolving diasporic landscape.

Participants co-created a large-scale net installation—a web embedded with glass “tears,” each one a physical marker of grief, hope, and lived experience. The net becomes a shared artifact: a future relic that holds the complexity of adoptee identity while imagining adoptees as future ancestors within an evolving web of relations.

Project generously funded by Boston Chinatown Arts, Culture & Community Funding Grant, Funded by the Culture & Community Power Fund, Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC), Chinatown Community Land Trust (CCLT), and Pao Arts Center and The Project Evolution Grant (PEG), funded by the Community Foundation of Western Massachusetts’s ValleyCreates Initiative, administered by Assets for Artists.

Photography by Isabella Kahn.