Makoto Fujimura, the renowned Japanese-American artist and cultural commentator, delivered a profoundly moving address at Belhaven University in 2011, just weeks after returning from the devastation of Japan's 3/11 earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster. He had walked through the ruins of Ishinomaki, a fishing village swept away by thirty-meter waves, where the stench of death filled the air and a seventeen-year-old girl whose parents and grandparents had been killed returned to find nothing worth salvaging. Against this backdrop of catastrophe, Fujimura argued that creating art in such times requires far more than naive optimism. Drawing on sociologist Zygmunt Bauman's concept of 'liquid modernity'—a world where all solid foundations are shifting—he warned that without the capacity to imagine and hope for 'the world that ought to be,' cynicism and despair will define it for us. The act of creation itself, he declared, becomes an act of resistance against despair, a declaration that life and beauty still matter even amid destruction.