About XUNKU

XUNKU is a digital civilization project rooted in China's grotto heritage: preserving vanishing grottoes through digital technology, using evidence-aware digital restoration to make damaged imagery and sculpture legible again, then turning the resulting cultural content and digital assets into cinema, exhibitions, immersive spaces, urban art stations and cultural goods that enter contemporary perception and daily life.

XUNKU is concerned not only with a grotto's appearance but with the imagery, architecture, sculpture, craft, body, belief, power and landscape that coexist within it. Facing weathering, damage, inaccessibility and a public-understanding gap, the project builds a digital life for each grotto that can be researched, reconstructed, communicated and sustainably used — without splitting "preservation" and "transmission" into two unrelated tasks: digital preservation forms the evidentiary base, evidence-aware restoration makes information visible again, and contemporary-experience transformation brings that information into people's bodily experience, emotional relationships and public life.

XUNKU was initiated in 2022 by artist Yu Zhen, who continues to lead the project as it moves from China's grottoes toward a shared dialogue with the world's grotto civilizations; the project is currently operated by Mixed Reality (Hangzhou) Digital Technology Co., Ltd., with "XUNKU" as its sole public-facing name and trademark.

Rather than reproducing heritage imagery, XUNKU asks how civilizational experience can continue to grow through new media. Panoramic cinema, spatial sound, real-time technologies and site-based culture form an unfolding journey.

“一地一洞天” is the current creative strategy: each site-based study begins with a specific grotto, landscape and historical relationship, then develops an independent content world. It is an ongoing method, not a list of completed locations.

Founder & Director

Yu Zhen is a digital artist, director, curator, researcher and professor whose practice spans digital art, immersive image, artificial intelligence and digital cultural heritage. He initiated XUNKU in 2022 and continues to serve as its founder and director, and previously served as Chief Curator of the first China Digital Art Exhibition.

He is Executive Deputy Director of the AI Center and Deputy Dean of the School of Innovation Design at China Academy of Art, and Deputy Director of the Digital Art Committee of the China Artists Association.

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