IT'S ONLY THE END OF THE WORLD

The stories of the end of the world are fascinating because they reflect our anxieties about the present. Yet rather than urging us to, as Haraway says, “stay with the trouble” and engage with the tangled realities of our time, these stories often drift into romantic, escapist fantasies. Apocalypse becomes a form of relief—a way to imagine an ending instead of reckoning with the ongoing, uncomfortable work of living in damaged worlds. Haraway reminds us that the world does not end all at once but unravels unevenly, in ways that demand response rather than resignation.

The series It’s Only the End of the World is an inquiry into this paradox—the seductive nature of disaster. Mel Chan renders destruction (in this case, volcanic eruption) not as something fierce and terrifying, but as tender, dreamy, melancholic, feminine. The pastel pink tones and softened brushstrokes invite viewers to linger, to relax into a world dissolving like a half-remembered dream. Here, doomsday fantasy reveals itself: it is not terror, but comfort. Perhaps too much comfort—a kind of aestheticized nihilism, a lullaby for crisis rather than a call to stay with it.