Archive of Subterranean Acoustics

Archive of Subterranean Acoustics is an installation and multi-media presentation hosted by Hongbo Cai, A4’s 2025 Van Lier Fellow in Music Composition. This event marks the culmination of Cai’s fellowship and presents a collection of prototyped artifacts, simulated spatial environments, and world-building video installations that together reconstruct the mythical, subterranean sonic civilization of Agharta.

Across millennia and continents, civilizations share a belief that sound is a tool to measure, order, and interpret the universe. This project asks 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?

“Agharta” is borrowed from legend of a mythical city said to lie beneath the Himalayas or Tibet, on the Earth’s inner surface. Through 3D modeling, the project attempts to bring this fictional city to life, designing virtual instruments that blur archaeology, mechanics, and invention based on Asian civilizations. 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.

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and The New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowships.

About Hongbo Cai

Hongbo Cai is an interdisciplinary musician, writer, and filmmaker whose work blends performance practice with contemporary media inquiry. A 2025 graduate of The Juilliard School with a master’s degree in music, he made his Carnegie Hall debut at 21 and joined the NYU piano faculty as an adjunct instructor at 22. As a soloist, he has performed with leading ensembles, including the Shanghai Opera House, Shanghai Philharmonic, Xiamen Philharmonic, West New York Chamber Orchestra, Pazardzhik State Symphony Orchestra (Bulgaria), Mikhail Jora Philharmonic Orchestra (Romania), Florence Philharmonic, New York Youth Orchestra, Orquestra do Algarve (Portugal), and musicians of the New York Philharmonic. The Herald praised him as an “accomplished musician … with command of style and a refreshingly individual approach.”

Since 2022, he has served as an accredited press member at the Cannes Film Festival and has contributed film criticism and auteur studies to AHCI-indexed journals such as CINEFORUM and Strad Research. His films have been featured at the Beijing International Short Film Festival, Toronto International Independent Short Film Festival, and Clermont-Ferrand Short Film Festival.

Hongbo’s multimedia work has been selected for the College Blend of Venice Biennale, The Slant Foundation’s Asian PaCIVCS program, Juilliard’s Risk Lab Residency, and the Community Impact Residency for US Emerging Artists (2025). His creative practice focuses on the indigenous rituals, folklore, and performative traditions of ethnic minority cultures, which he approaches as expressions of nature’s unrestrained vitality—materializing through dramatic landscapes, soundscapes, animal deities, and transformations across transdisciplinary media. Hongbo is the Asian American Arts Alliance’s 2025 Van Lier Fellow in Music Composition. @hongbo_tsai

Accessibility: The gallery is ADA accessible, located on the ground floor without any steps. The bathroom is also ADA accessible and gender neutral.