Nuclear Alphabet — Home — Emily Xintong Yan

Emily Xintong Yan

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Emily Xintong Yan is an architectural designer and researcher passionate about space, design and their fables.

Her work are driven by an intuitive desire to investigate and storytell. Her ongoing research projects are genre-bending pursuits, intrigued by the capacity of humanism and spatial sociology. Her paper architecture explores the fictive potential of tectonic forms and embeds philosophies of dwelling inspired by film, literature and dreams. Her narrative style emulsifies fiction and nonfiction, poeticism and history, creative writing and reportage. She is dedicated to a multi-disciplinary practice where architecture, arts, and letters reaffirm our human presence in the world.

She was born in Singapore, raised in China, grew up in the UK and educated in the US.

The Alphabet
The Waiting Room
The Utopia
The Garden
The Residence I
The Lighthouse
The Residence II
The Gallery
The Bridge
The Postcard
The Shell
The Archives
The Museum
The Trees
The Place

Research, Exhibition

Nuclear Alphabet

Ongoing

How can art and design make visible the dangerously invisible? Nuclear Alphabet is an ongoing archive and exhibition project that takes up precisely this question. With the goal of educating youth and adults on the effects of nuclear events on our bodies, cultures, ecologies, and futures, the exhibition turns toward the most prevalent reaction to the nuclear — fear, by formalizing a material record to be experienced, examined, and reviewed.

The webpage A to Z, exhibited in the library reading room, catalogs material and immaterial nuclear contaminations, tracing its often mute but commonplace presence in mainstream culture, collective consciousness, the natural world, and geopolitical borders. Indexed as everyday vocabulary, each entry in the alphabet includes a video built from found images, sounds, and footage — revealing the new meanings charged into ordinary words by the invention and development of nuclear technology. In other words: this is an alphabet of contaminated language, a lexicon for the otherwise obscure and unspeakable in the nuclear age.

Enter A to Z here

Index

Email, are.na

Last edited in 2026