Cover photo. Photographer: Paul Chelmis

BLACK ROCK DESERT, NV - Oct 9, 2025 - Wind howled across the playa, gusting at 70 miles per hour with fury. Within minutes, shade structures crumpled, tents lifted into the sky, and a 27-foot-tall pink dice sculpture, still unfinished, was reduced to rubble. What began as a mild build week at Burning Man 2025 turned into one of the most destructive storms in over a decade, toppling sculptures and rewriting the fate of several of the event’s most powerful installations.

Among the hardest hit: Mona DIE! DIE! DIE!, the final piece in a trilogy by artist Miao He, following the 30-foot pink Mona Bunny and the towering Mona Mushroom. The sculpture - a giant wooden die painted in bright pink hues - was designed to explore themes of destiny and chance, chaos and impermanence, and invited participants to step into the unknown with curiosity and just “roll with it.” And this year, the playa surely did provide plenty of chaos to embrace:

As the building team was lowering the third piece of the cube into place, suddenly a once-a-decade dust storm swept in without a warning, diminishing visibility to an arm’s length and tipping over the forklift holding the piece. “The giant die groaned, and crashed to the ground, shattering into many pieces before it was ever whole. “When you summon chaos, you don’t always get to choose what you get”, comments build crew member Benjamin Brast-McKie.

But its story didn’t end there. Instead, the ruins became a new beginning.

Photographer: Paul Chelmis

Rolling into the Unknown

Rather than trying to conceal the damage, the team decided to embrace it. Improvising in the face of chaos, the builders reassembled the remaining die faces as a pyramid; broken surfaces became new entry points, transforming the dice into an interactive installation that could be climbed like ancient ruins. Participants stepped into the cracks, confronting fragility not as failure but as part of the piece’s life cycle. “I could not have come up with a better depiction of chaos by myself”, muses project lead Janis K. Hesse, “Nature has inadvertently become a core collaborator. She fractured our art piece into many pieces but at the same time made it more complete than we could have ever planned.”Mona DIE! DIE! DIE! was one of three art pieces that got destroyed by the storm on Saturday. In a twist of poetic irony, one curious observer noted that nature had selected the three art pieces at Burning Man where the destruction was meaningful in context of their themes of impermanence and resilience.

Black Cloud: From Looming Shadow to ‘No Fate’

Nearby, Ukrainian artists led by Oleksiy Sai raised Black Cloud, a massive inflatable monument to the looming destructiveness of war. Hours before Ukrainian Independence Day, the storm tore the cloud apart. After the storm. the fragments were reassembled into letters spelling a stark message across the playa: “No Fate”, referencing the quote “there is no fate but the one we make for ourselves” according to lead producer Vitaliy Deynega. What began as a looming presence transformed into a declaration — the idea that the future, however uncertain, is not yet written.

Resilience: Tested Again

North Carolina survivors of Hurricane Helene, led by Whitney Webb, built Resilience from the ruins of their own homes. The work was a tribute to rebuilding after devastation. When the Burning Man storm toppled it, the artists responded in kind: they rebuilt again, on the spot, with whatever fragments the desert left them. Whitney Webb recalls: “I've been saying, throughout this whole build, that resilience isn't just about surviving the storm. t's about what you create from the wreckage. And, you know, we're getting a chance to do that in real time…It’s extra resilient now.”

Mona Funeral March and Burn

To honor the art pieces damaged during the storm, Mona’s team led a New Orleans-style jazz funeral parade. Participants dressed in pink and as gods of death and marched from Center Camp to Mona DIE! DIE! DIE!, stopping at various art pieces for interactive performances and culminating in burning the of Mona DIE! DIE! DIE!. Concurrent with a symposium on chaos, impermanence, and the self, participants made their own death mask representing their external identity and labels, to be burned in a pink coffin together with the art piece. Artists of other destroyed or damaged art pieces contributed pieces to the pink coffin, and after a series of eulogies and performances, the coffin was loaded into the dice and burned with dramatic pyrotechnic effects.

Photographer: Chongming Zhong

“I am very happy how the team handled the fall of our art piece,” says Janis K. Hesse, “It is easy to call the collapse of the structure a failure and give up. But leaning into the theme of the piece, our team really did embrace the chaos brought by nature and improvised a sculpture with new meaning. And given how the teams of the destroyed art pieces supported each other to rebuild anew, I think the storm didn’t destroy Blackrock City but brought us closer together, turning the chaos into something unexpectedly beautiful.”

Photographer: Chongming Zhong

The Playa as Co-Author

Together, these works showed how art at Burning Man 2025 was less destroyed than rewritten. Black Cloud scattered into No Fate. Resilience was rebuilt twice. Mona DIE! DIE! DIE! taught its team how to embrace chaos and impermanence. In the Blackrock desert, art is never finished. It constantly evolves, shaped by people, nature and the unexpected and gains new meaning through the course of the event.

Photographer: Jamen Percy

About Mona Art Foundation

Miao He, born in a small village in rural China, graduated from the China Academy of Art and founded the Mona Art Foundation, a nonprofit supporting marginalized artists and exploring the power of art in mental health. This year, the foundation supported multiple art pieces at Burning Man, including WiFi Jail, an interactive structure designed by children artists aged 6 to 13 to resemble a prison cell. By placing participants inside the jail to access free WiFi, while others watched from outside, the project forced a confrontation with digital dependency. “We give away our attention too easily,” says lead artist Weisen Wang, “No one looks up anymore.” WiFi Jail reminded participants that real freedom might lie not in constant connection, but in choosing when to unplug and reconnect with each other, face-to-face.

Photographer: Paul Chelmis

A projector light show led by Chinese artist Quansheng Li projected visual art from over ten international artists, including Yang He and Bowei Wang, onto the remaining sides of the cube. “We prepared the funeral, but nature chose the timing”, says Miao He, citing the three deaths of the art piece; “Its first death was by storm, its second death was by fire. The third death will be in memory, after everyone forgot about it, but this appears to be in the distant future.”

Photographer: Bowei Wang. Artist: Miao He

Photographer: Bowei Wang. Artist: Yang He

The foundation also supported arts students bringing their paintings and music to Center Camp for the Mona Funeral March event, and enabled international artists to display their digital art onto the die faces at night. Mona Art Foundation also produced a feature-length documentary film capturing the story of Miao He and the story unfolding at Burning Man this year, that is planned to release next year.

Photographer: Bowei Wang

Acknowledgments

Build Team: Mackenzie Pelletier, Benjamin Brast-McKie, Janis K. Hesse, Sparkle Pony, Renzo Verbeck, Nathan Heintz, Irene Rembado, Brian Gonzales, Ke Ming, Helen Yu, Grant Gordon, Robert Tromm, Jay Calleton, Aron Parks, Evan, Drew Wilson, Ryan Hubbs.

Documentary Team: Jing Wen, Paul Chelmis, Denis Pacuraru, Jessica Yuan, Ruoyun Tang

Video Art Unit Artists: Quansheng Li, Yang He, Bowei Wang, Zhaojun Liu, Sikey Wong, Haiyang Hu, Aiju Wang, Charmaine Lacsina, Jingxuan Hu, Yichu Li, Mantou Lin, Sophia Guo

Speakers and Performance Artists for Funeral March: Janis K. Hesse, Miao He, Philip DePoala, Charmaine Lacsina, Inani Schroedinger, Nicky Mehtani, Ben Brast-McKie, Rae Gross, Nathan Heintz, Irene Rembado, Leonardo Christov-Moore, Liz “Reality” Kilkenny, Shai Yeshanov, Kian Locke, Anthony Moreno, Julep de Soie

Burn Team: Al Stahler, Scott Ashkenaz, Grant Gordon, Kenneth Shinozuka

Youth Project "Phone Cell” (WiFi Jail) lead artists: Weisen Wang, Jason Wang, Yimo Wang, Yichen Dong, Ziyuan Fang, Yifei Peng, Yiyue Peng, Rongyi Li, Rongxing Li

Contributing artists: Yige Xie, Yaxuan Zhu, Houxiang Wang, Junyu Li, Mooie&Gala, Qi Haoran

Mona Art Foundation Support Team: Miao He, Monica Hsu, Yaqin He, Weiqiang Huang, Ruoyan Wang, Yue Yao

Photographer: Denis Pacuraru

Media Contact
Company Name: Mona Art Foundation
Contact Person: Miao He
Email: Send Email
City: New York
State: New York
Country: United States
Website: http://monaartfund.org