Pure Land: inside the Mogao Grottoes at Dunhuang (2012/16) was created by professors Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw at City University, Homg Kong in partnership with the custodians of the site, the Dunhuang Academy. It was installed for the Art Gallery of NSW exhibition Tang: treasures from the Silk Road capital by the Laboratory for Innovation in Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums, University of NSW.
___________
Wall stories
The ancient oasis town of Dunhuang, in far north-western China, once lay at the crossroads of two great trade routes along the fabled Silk Road. There, in markets serenaded by the “singing sands” of nearby Mingsha Mountain, travellers and traders heading west met those journeying from India, perhaps passing by on their way into Mongolia. These trade routes made Dunhuang a microcosm of ancient globalisation and cosmopolitanism, but more things were exchanged in Dunhuang than ivory and jade. The routes also brought cultural emissaries, including Buddhist monks from the subcontinent whose influence lives on today.
Twenty-five kilometres southeast of Dunhuang lies one of the world’s great repositories of Buddhist art: the UNESCO World Heritage site of the Mogao Grottoes, also known as the “Caves of the thousand Buddhas”. It is a complex of almost 750 caves, 492 of which contain over 45,000 sqm of mural paintings and over 2000 stucco sculptures. These grottoes were hewn into the rockface by ancient Buddhist monks as shrines, repositories and places of reflection. The largest is around 40m height and home to a 30m high, Tang Dynasty statue of Buddha.
This important site is now threatened by its popularity as a tourist destination due to rising levels of humidity and carbon dioxide inside the caves. As a result, since 1999 the Dunhuang Academy – custodian of the site – has embarked on an ambitious program to digitise the grottoes through high-resolution photography and laser scanning.
Visitors to Tang treasures from the Silk Road capital will be able
to retrace the steps of an archaeologist exploring one of the Dunhuang
caves as if they were there, through the immersive installation Pure Land: Augmented Reality Edition (2012/2016). Pure Land uses high-resolution digital photographs and laser scans, produced by the Dunhuang Academy, to reconstruct Cave 220, which is permanently closed to the public due to the importance of its Tang era paintings.
The four walls of Cave 220 are intricately detailed with murals and sculptures, each depicting a different Buddhist sutra, or scripture, from the Pure Land Buddhist tradition.
Entering through the cave door and using an iPad as a window onto this ancient scene, visitors become performers in the cave space. As they move between the murals, the artworks are rendered in real time on the screen, in relationship to their own path through the space. Approaching the walls of the cave brings the works closer and closer to real size, allowing visitors to study paintings and sculptures at a detail almost impossible to actual visitors to the cave.
Pure Land has played a leading role in supporting the mission of the Dunhuang Academy to preserve Chinese Buddhist heritage. It gives a glimpse into the potential for digital technologies to preserve sensitive sites, to create new ways of experiencing art works and to translate cultural stories for new audiences.
Pure Land is a collaboration between the Dunhuang Academy and City University of Hong Kong, created by Professors Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw with application software by Dr Leith Chan, The University of Hong Kong.
At the Art Gallery of NSW, Pure Land is being produced under the direction of Prof Kenderdine, Director of the Laboratory for Innovation in galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (iGLAM), University of New South Wales. This installation completes all four walls of Cave 220, the first time the full cave has been reconstructed in augmented reality form.
First published as ‘Wall Stories’, Look, April, 2016, 35.
For more, see Sarah Kenderdine, ‘”Pure Land”: Inhabiting the Mogao Caves at Dunhuang’, Curator: the Museum Journal, vol. 56, no.2, April 2013, 199-218.