Corpus Mundi (The Body of the World), an extension of the artist's prior work VESSEL (2025), is a virtual reality experience that reimagines the human body as an immersive symbolic landscape where anatomy, consciousness, nature and the cosmos converge.

Across civilisations, the body has long been understood not merely as biological matter, but as a living expression of the world around it. Corpus Mundi draws on this lineage, alongside research spanning anatomy, mathematics and natural pattern, cosmology, and cross-cultural understandings of consciousness, to ask how virtual reality might reframe the body from a subject of anatomical study into an immersive experience of spirituality and embodiment.

Through virtual reality, participants journey inward across multiple scales of existence, transforming the body from an object of observation into a space of embodied reflection. The work opens at the iris, drawing participants through its pupil into a tunnel of neurons and firing synapses, their branching pathways echoing the growth of trees and river deltas. Descending further, cells give way to DNA, to molecules, to atoms where the same branching logic that built a neuron begins to resemble something else entirely: matter unravelling into drifting nebulae, spiralling galaxies, and the vast filaments of the cosmic web.

At its furthest reach, this web folds back inward, resolving ambiguously, almost imperceptibly into the very iris where the journey began. What first appeared to be two unrelated scales, the microscopic and the cosmic, reveal themselves as a single recurring structure.

The deepest journey inward becomes the broadest journey outward, revealing the interconnectedness of self, nature and the universe. As life is lived forward, but experienced backwards, the body is not studied from the outside, but recognised, from within, as a landscape already containing everything beyond it.

XR Legacy is led by Benedict Yu, managed by Lisa Park, and supported by the National Arts Council of Singapore.

Under guidance of Koh Kai Ting, Wu Zi-Jing and Ziyang Wu.

Photography by @mojojobby