A collective organized through Auroborium brought Do Baskets Dream of Shores or Sea to Burning Man 2026, an installation of seven Vietnamese thúng chài set adrift in a sea of lanterns. The piece was one of 75 projects to receive a 2026 Black Rock City Honoraria grant from Burning Man Project.
Thúng chài are round basket boats of handwoven bamboo, long part of the working lives of Vietnamese fishermen. Lead artist Luke Lin says the craft "is starting to die out, as they're relegated to vessels for tourists, and when they are made, they're increasingly being made out of plastic." In the installation, the baskets "are mourning and grieving a lost identity that's fading into time."
HuiWoon Tan, the project's artistic steward and advisor, brought the thúng chài to the collaboration along with a story about finding meaning in migration. Lin, who was born in Taiwan and raised in America, added the lanterns to bring his Taiwanese heritage into the work. He had worked on the Temple build at Burning Man in 2024 and 2025 before leading a piece of his own.
The lanterns draw on Asian rituals that carry people between the living and the dead or hold intentions for what comes next. In Lin's words, they "represent the thing that carries us, even though we feel lost, toward an uncertain future." The boats were handwoven and painted on the coast of Vietnam and shipped to the lakebed of Black Rock City, a harsh environment "that was also once a lake that carried boats."
Heather Isobe and Alexa Cohn led the project operations, Amy Selyne led the build, and Hong Tuoi Ly ran operations in Vietnam. The wider crew listed on the project site includes engineers, lighting and sound crew, a project manager, and fundraising and volunteer organizers.
XR developer Josette Seitz and her team scanned Do Baskets twice on the playa for BurnerSphere, once by day and once in the evening. The daytime capture was made with XGRIDS' PortalCam, a handheld spatial camera that pairs four cameras with a LiDAR unit. The evening capture was made with the Lixel L2 LiDAR scanner. Both were processed into gaussian splats in LCC Studio, locally and through LCC Cloud.
Seitz has previously documented Burning Man art for BurnerSphere by shooting large sculptures with a 4K camera on a three meter pole and filling in their tops with drones. In 2026 BurnerSphere added evening scans alongside its daytime ones, so Do Baskets can be explored in VR either in daylight or after dark.
BurnerSphere is a social VR recreation of Black Rock City built by Big Rock Creative (BRCvr) under license from Burning Man Project. Registration is free, and the app runs on Mac and PC without a headset or in VR on Meta Quest and on PCVR through Steam. A basic level of content is open to registered guests, and Camp Dues membership, from $6.98 a month or $47.98 a year, unlocks full access to the virtual playa.
Lin frames the installation as a way to "celebrate Asian culture and Asian aesthetic at Burning Man," and as a space for anyone carrying a sense of lostness. Both versions can be visited in BurnerSphere.
