Exhibition | Fragmented yet Connected: Paths to Wisdom at the Zhihua Temple

The Hong Kong Jockey Club University of Chicago Academic Complex | The University of Chicago Francis and Rose Yuen Campus in Hong Kong
168 Victoria Road
Mount Davis, Hong Kong Island
Hong Kong SAR

The University of Chicago’s Center for the Art of East Asia presents Fragmented yet Connected: Paths to Wisdom at the Zhihua Temple from June 5 to December 4, 2026, at the University of Chicago Hong Kong Campus. The exhibition brings together interactive storytelling, digital reconstruction, and immersive media to explore how new technologies transform ways we experience, interpret, and care for cultural heritage. 

Fragmented yet Connected asks a timely question for digital cultural heritage: Do technologies help us perceive interconnections among seemingly isolated objects, places, and histories, or do they fragment attention and reinforce separation? Drawing on Buddhist ideas of wisdom (prajñā) as insight into interdependence, Fragmented yet Connected invites visitors to consider museum objects not as isolated specimens, but as nodes within wider networks of history and human experience. 

Rather than presenting the past as a single linear timeline, Fragmented yet Connected unfolds through a fabulated narrative centered on a coffered ceiling removed from Zhihua Temple’s Wanfo Pavilion. As visitors move through the exhibition, they descend through layered dreamscapes that evoke nested worlds of memory and imagination. 

Zhihua Temple and a global story of dispersal 
Zhihua Temple is a Ming dynasty Buddhist monastery in Beijing, constructed in the mid-fifteenth century under the patronage of the powerful eunuch Wang Zhen. The temple is known not only for its architecture, which integrates Tibetan and Han Chinese Buddhist styles, but also for its living musical tradition linked to the imperial court. 

In the early twentieth century, key architectural components from Zhihua Temple were removed and sold into overseas museum collections. Two of the temple’s carved coffered ceilings have since resided at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City and the Philadelphia Museum of Art and thus become a part of the global story of dispersed Chinese cultural heritage. 

Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project 
Fragmented yet Connected is part of the Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project (DCADP), an initiative spearheaded by the University of Chicago’s Center for the Art of East Asia. Launched in 2019, DCADP uses 3D scanning and digital reconstruction to document artifacts removed from important cultural sites in China, virtually re-situate them in their original spatial and historical contexts, and build public-facing experiences that reconnect people, objects, and places. 

Exhibition Opening Event (In-person) 

Friday, June 5, 2026 

4:45 PM - 5:00 PM  Guests check in 
5:00 PM - 5:15  PM  Remarks by Prof. Wei-Cheng Lin and Ellen Larson 
5:15  PM - 6:15 PM   Exhibition tour and talk by Mengge Cao/ Heritage tour 
6:15  PM – 7:00 PM  Reception 

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Fragmented yet Connected: Paths to Wisdom at the Zhihua Temple is organized by Center for the Art of East Asia at the University of Chicago. Co-organizers include the School of Architecture at Tsinghua University and Center for the Three-Dimensional Arts at Xi’an Jiaotong University. Generous funding support has been provided by Cyrus Tang Foundation, The University of Chicago campus in Hong Kong, The Hong Kong Jockey Club Charities Trust, and University of Chicago Department of Art History.