Guided Tour: "The Atlas of Maritime Buddhism" with Dr. Isabelle Frank, Director of the Indra and Harry Banga Gallery

The HKU Museum Society is pleased to organize a guided tour to visit the exhibition The Atlas of Maritime Buddhism with Dr. Isabelle Frank, Director of the Indra and Harry Banga Gallery at City University of Hong Kong.

The Atlas of Maritime Buddhism is a cutting-edge exhibition that traces the religion’s development along the Maritime route from India across Asia, providing a dazzling visual immersion into major historic Buddhist sites. The integration of virtual scenography, 3D stereoscopic visualizations, and physical sculptures, generously loaned from Hong Kong collections, defines the new approach to museology presented by the Atlas of Maritime Buddhism. It gives visitors an intense visual and auditory experience of Buddhism in its richly varied forms, as it was developed throughout Southeast Asia, and in China and Japan. The Atlas of Maritime Buddhism is a crucial reminder of the continued importance of the Silk Road, which stimulated economic, social, and cultural development across Asia, today revived in the Belt and Road initiative.

Professor Jeffrey Shaw, Chair Professor of Media Art at CityU, and Professor Sarah Kenderdine, Professor of Digital Museology at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne, are responsible for the original concept of the exhibition, and were assisted by a team of scholars in realizing this ambitious project, initially, at the Fo Guang Shan Museum of Buddhism in Taiwan and, now at City University of Hong Kong.

Speaker

Dr. Isabelle Frank focuses on curating exhibitions that combine technology and the arts and bridge Western and Asian cultures.  An art historian by training with a PhD from Harvard University, she first taught at the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts and was then Associate Dean for Academic Affair at The New School, and Dean at Fordham University’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies.  She has published on Italian Renaissance art and decorative art as well as edited many exhibition catalogues for the City University Exhibition Gallery, including Cabinets of curiosities, Art Deco. The France-China Connection, and most recently Leonardo da Vinci: Art & Science, Then & Now.