A major milestone and world-renowned heritage site within Silk Road networks, Dunhuang preserves more than 400 embellished Buddhist cave shrines in present-day northwest China.

Dunhuang’s cave shrines date from the fifth to fourteenth centuries. Each encloses visitors within murals and carved figures that depict Buddhist legends and paradises. Chronicling innumerable exemplary works of Buddhist artmaking over centuries, Dunhuang forms the largest encyclopedia art collection in situ. More significant than these artistic achievements, the caves offer a glimpse into a universe that rests beyond our known physical reality. Much like the shadowy illusions of Plato’s allegorical cave, the pictorial programs across Dunhuang’s caves reveal higher truths about life, death, and spiritual transcendence.

This fall, CAMLab contextualizes Dunhuang within Buddhism’s broader currents of space- and art-making that surged across China during the medieval period.

• Immersing visitors in confluences of light and sound, the Cave Dance and Shadow Cave projects are case studies of two Dunhuang caves that reimagine the rich theatricality conjured by depictions of the dramas of the Buddha’s life and dances of transcendent beings.

• Rebuilding the world’s tallest pagoda in VR, the Embodied Architecture project invokes an 11the century transmission of these dynamics within the towering Shayka pagoda of the Fogang Monastery in present-day Yingxian, China. There, Buddhist pictorial motifs demarcate a journey of ascension toward enlightenment.

• The Digital Temple project uses an interactive interface to unpack the multiplicity of compositions and multivalent topographies rendered across the murals of Kaihua monastery.

By examining Buddhism’s three primary contexts in medieval China—the cave, the pagoda, and the temple—these CAMLab projects reveal the dramatic perceptual experiences and invisible force fields embedded by visual programs within Buddhist sites.

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