Dunhuang Con-stella-tion敦煌·共熠

Dunhuang Con-stella-tion was one of twelve works selected for the China Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2025. Curated by Ma Yansong of MAD Architects under the theme “CO-EXIST”, the pavilion explores the interdependence and harmonious coexistence of diverse cultures. Atelier Alter’s answer takes Dunhuang and the starry sky as its subjects, building a bridge between Chinese and Western civilisations.

Carved into the Mingsha cliffs from 366 CE, the Mogao Grottoes grew over a millennium into a 1,600-metre cave complex where Indian, Sogdian, Persian, Greek and Chinese traditions met along the Silk Road — an echo of Venice’s own history as a cultural port. The four-sloped dome of Cave 285, from the Western Wei period, holds the earliest documented star map of the Northern Hemisphere, woven together with Sogdian sun and moon deities, Brahma and Ganesha, Fuxi and the phoenix. The Tang-era Dunhuang Star Chart, aligned with the night sky over Chang’an, treated the heavens as a dynamic field of data. Reread today, it becomes a “civilisational energy diagram” in which four cultural nebulae converge.

The installation renders this map as a 12 × 8 × 6.5 m three-dimensional star field. Metal spheres, rods, mesh and multicoloured acrylic form an abstract nebula holding five constellations of the northern sky, with dust-like particles recalling the brushstrokes of Dunhuang’s artisans. Suspended in the hall, it mirrors the gathering of global architecture at the Biennale. True cultural fusion is not a layering of styles but the organic recombination of cultural DNA: civilisation lives not in guarding origins, but in continual encounter and rebirth.