Preserving and exhibiting intangible cultural heritage via virtual museum: A case study of the Hungry Ghosts Festival in Hong Kong

Abstract

This paper documents and reflects on the process of preserving and presenting the ICH in the form of a virtual museum by taking the case study of a China’s national-grade intangible cultural heritage – the Hungry Ghosts Festival organized by the Chaozhou community in Hong Kong. The documentation, exhibition and interpretation in this virtual museum adopt a participatory bottom-up approach, in which the voices of the local organizers and participants are highlighted, and personal anecdotes are played up. The virtual museum intends to aggregate and exhibit all the elements of this ICH in one virtual space, including its origins and development, the tangible artefacts it entails, its dynamic and fluidic nature (e.g., ambiance, performance, communal spirits), and its multiple layers of meanings. As the Hungry Ghosts Festival celebration lasts merely a matter of days each year at a particular place for a local community, this virtual museum enables a wider public to access this festival at any time, in any place and from different dimensions. This paper shows how the virtual museum presents the aforementioned facets of the ICH through different display techniques and evaluates their usefulness, including (1) traditional text and image panels, (2) 3D reconstructed scene and models, and (3) 360-degree video. This is significantly different from the earlier work, which mainly focused on the accuracy of re-enacting the given form of intangible cultural heritage, such as performance and craftsmanship in a virtual environment, or a particular creative presentation by professional performers and elites with specific meanings.