Designs on Dunhuang

A sworn admirer of Dunhuang art, architect Joseph Chan set his students a challenging exercise - to create designs for "a hypothetical Dunhuang art and culture promotion and learning center in Hong Kong". Ideas flew in, thick and fast. And soon Chan was inundated with models and 3D projections inspired by Dunhuang, enough to mount an exhibition, held in Mei Foo.

One of the most innovative designs came from Andrew Cheung, who imagined a space with a roof torn and caved in - much like the paint flaking off the murals in Dunhuang. Cheung, however, saw this more as a wound - a memento of foreign aggression at Dunhuang. He visualized the foyer leading to the main hall of the museum entirely in black and white marble, to accentuate the contours of the lesion. The idea was to recall the painful past.

Yves Wong took inspiration from the fluid, sometimes contorting, movement and the flight path of the apsara (dancing angels) on the walls of the Mogao caves and replicated these in designing the roof. It was somewhat aligned to the whimsical "dancing buildings" by the celebrated architect Frank Gehry, "only more subtle and abstract", says Chan.

But are these designs workable?

"Dunhuang is an archive of Chinese architectural history," says Chan. "We need the skill, vision and creativity to adapt elements from ancient Chinese architecture in our own times."

"Experimenting with Dunhuang-inspired designs in architecture is one way of getting to understand Chinese history," he says. But then the same could be said of most other aspects of Dunhuang, he adds.