It’s a crisis of liberal cultural institutions that we are confronting.

The most consistent yet overlooked character of any horror is easily the haunted house.

The exhibition “The Moon Represents My Heart: Music, Memory and Belonging” at the Museum of Chinese in America offers us an opportunity to study the enduring silence-cum-visibility. Co-curated by Hua Hsu, staff writer at The New Yorker, as well as Herb Tam and Andrew Rebatta from MOCA’s curatorial team, the ensemble of over fifty artists surveys a Chinese American history in which a disciplined muteness can be felt: from Yoyo Ma’s perfected recitals of Western classical music to C. Spencer Yeh’s rebellious improvisations against this tradition. But this weight could just as easily apply more broadly to others not in the show; I also thought of Mitski’s escape into ulterior identities (“Be the Cowboy”) and Rina Sawayama’s stylized cyborgian fit (“Cyber Stockholm Syndrome”).