The Chengdu Biennale 2026 — titled Pulse of Life and hosted at the Chengdu Tianfu Art Museum — brought together designers, artists, architects, scientists, and composers from nine countries and four continents under the curatorial theme Back to Life. Back to Reality. The Biennale’s Design Section was organized across three spatially and conceptually distinct rooms: Contemplation (Black Space), Inspiration (Green Space), and Creation (White Space).

Materiality Research Group contributed to the Inspiration space — a dense, immersive environment of living plants, mist, and shifting light spanning 855 m² — curated by Martin Rendel. The space served as a speculative arena for futures not yet built, placing design visions within a living landscape rather than a conventional exhibition setting.

Seven selected Master students from the Integrated Design program at Hochschule Anhalt Dessau developed speculative video works in response to the core question: how do we want to live in 2055, in balance with nature and technology? Their works were shown on large screens embedded within the living landscape, positioning speculative design output within a non-anthropocentric environment that blurred the boundary between installation, ecology, and moving image.