Nestled into the western foothills of the Taihang range in China’s Shanxi province, Kaihua Monastery (c.1073/1092–96) was once a large complex of structures. However, today only one Northern-Song building still stands: its main Buddha hall, namely the Mahavira hall (in Chinese: Daxiong baodian 大雄寶殿, the Treasure Hall of the Great Hero). With an interior rich in pictorial iconographies, this Buddha Hall’s visual program transformed it into a virtual theater by embedding both temporal and spatial transformations within its representations. By unpacking the artistic and religious underpinnings of the temple’s visual program, CAMLab stages a virtual experience of the temple’s transformative process, through which an array of semiotic and sensorial media reconstructs—and facilitates—the transcendence of embodiment.

Housing the earliest standing iteration of the Water-Land ritual murals, the waist hall of Qinglong Monastery in Jishan, Shanxi depicts rigorous ritual compositions and particularities of aesthetic taste. They are also a rare example of Water-Land ritual paintings in Song and Yuan temple traditions. Modelled after Qinglong Monastery, this online interactive world of Song and Yuan Temple presents proprietary academic research and high-definition images of the Qinglong Monastery murals. The mode of interactive, multi-sensory exploration and education will encourage viewers to retain the sacred space and intent within empathic philosophies.