Agharta (2025)

This project is selected as one of six projects in the inaugural College Blend of the Venice Biennale and is receiving funding support from the Asian American Arts Alliance and the Slants Foundation.

It emerges from a deceptively simple yet profound observation: while ruins can be excavated and ancient faces reconstructed, the sound of past civilizations remains elusive. Yet in antiquity, sonic systems carried a weight far beyond entertainment: the Chinese lülü (律吕) once calibrated calendars and measures, while the Pythagoreans in Greece envisioned a cosmic harmony in the “music of the spheres.” Across millennia and continents, civilizations shared a belief that sound was a primary tool for measuring, ordering, and interpreting the universe. This project builds on that fascination by asking: what might it mean to reconstruct the “sound-world” of an ancient city, and what if the city itself could become a giant instrument shaped by winds, waters, labor, and ritual?

Taking this speculation as its narrative, the work envisions a sonic architecture of a city called Agharta. The name itself is borrowed from legend, referring to a mythical city said to lie beneath the Himalayas, on the Earth’s inner surface. Through 3D modeling, the project attempts to bring this fictional city to life, designing fictional “instruments” that blur archaeology, mechanics, and invention based on Asian civilization: a reconstructed water pipe instrument guided by ancient auditory DNA; an Asian loom reimagined as a harp-like device, and a monumental sound-sculpture inspired by natural basalt cave formations in China, where pipes, winds, and resonant crystals create a navigable sonic environment. The resulting installation invites audiences to inhabit a world where sight serves sound, instruments are indistinguishable from social order, and music is not mere art but the very infrastructure of life—an ambiguous and haunting echo of how ancient Asian peoples may have experienced their worlds.