海上佛教地圖集：虛擬實境

The Atlas of Maritime Buddhism is their latest effort in making monumental memory out of fleeting moments, in order to connect with human endeavours of distant times whose meaning continues to resonate in our lives today. One senses a pathos in the artistic efforts of Shaw and Kenderdine, even though the image contents appear as deceptively straightforward as anthropological documentary. Moving slowly around the empty white gallery space while looking at one’s mobile phone or iPad screen, the coded discs on the floor open up worlds to remind us of the vast unknowns that separate these locations. From the intense gaze of each gallery visitor, one also senses the realization that here lies a vast human world, previously unimaginable to all of us, that has made humanity itself possible.

Excerpt from Atlas of Real Time Buddhism

Chang Tsong-Zung

On the Exhibition

The spread of Buddhism by maritime routes from the Ganges Basin in India to East and Inner Asia, in the early centuries of the Common Era (CE), is a crucial element in the history of the religion. Seaports and connecting sites located on rivers played a major role in the expansion of Buddhism beyond the shores of India. Buddhist art and architecture developed as the dharma spread, adapting and evolving in each new host country. From the earliest rock cut caves of India to iconic stupas and temples, many of these revered spaces are now national heritage monuments and UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Sculpture and architecture were intimately connected. Monumental reliefs were used to decorate the walls of buildings, and depictions of the Buddha and Bodhisattvas, key figures on the path to enlightenment, were popular in countries along the maritime route. Covering thousands of important Buddhist sites, the ATLAS OF MARITIME BUDDHISM maps these treasured monuments and sublime architectures of south, south-east, and eastern Asia. This project derives from extensive fieldwork journeys by the artists Kenderdine and Shaw covering seven countries over several years. A diverse range of sophisticated tools and techniques were used to document the sites and sculptures, including gigapixel spherical photography, film-based and digital stereoscopic 360-degree panoramas, photogrammetry that captured 3D models of objects and surround-sound recordings. The result is the world’s largest archive of fully immersive high-resolution panoramic and panoptic images, comprised of thousands of sites from India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and China.

The exhibition ATLAS OF MARITIME BUDDHISM – VR has been specially conceived by the artists for Hanart TZ. It is a satellite experience to the exhibition ATLAS OF MARITIME BUDDHISM that is currently showing at the Indra and Harry Banga Gallery at City University in Hong Kong. It features thirty-three selected works of 360-degree spherical photography that were made by the artists at important maritime Buddhist sites across Asia. These are presented as 80cm diameter circular images on the floor of the gallery that each have a QR code in the center. Using one’s smart phone or one of the provided iPads, visitors to this exhibition can then explore these sites in high-fidelity VR – the immersive sceneries of these sacred Buddhist sites completely surround the viewers as they move and look about on their mobile screens. The resulting exhibition is a conjunction of the real and virtual whereby an empty gallery space comes to contain a profound articulation of multifold Buddhist settings that spring up like lotus flowers from these digital imprints.

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