An exhibition celebrating Congolese art where Congolese people owned basically none of it. A market boom that left local artists poorer than before. Master painters who no longer touch a brush. Galleries where most of the paintings are Pinterest copies. Welcome to Kinshasa’s art world a decade after “Beauté Congo”—where success became the architect of failure, where being discovered by the West meant losing yourself, and where the cure turned out to be worse than the disease. This is what cultural extraction looks like in the 21st century: not with colonial officers and forced labor, but with champagne openings, international acclaim, and prices so inflated that an entire community can no longer afford its own culture.

Walk through Kinshasa today, and you’ll encounter Alfred Liyolo’s legacy in two forms: bronze sculptures gracing public squares and his smiling face on Tembo beer advertisements throughout the city. That a beloved Congolese beer brand chose an artist to represent their product speaks volumes about how Liyolo captured the nation’s heart.
The journey from Bolobo, a humble riverside town on the Congo River where Liyolo was born in 1943, to Kokyo (Tokyo’s Imperial Palace) where he became the first and only African artist ever received by Emperor Akihito, is extraordinary. This is the story of how a grandson of an ivory carver transformed bronze into bridges between worlds, proved that art could speak to emperors and common people alike, and became a symbol of Congolese pride served with every bottle of beer in the nation’s capital.