What if Buddhist art has the potential to be an active participant in how we understand and respond to climate crisis? Buddha|Nature: Five Dialogues on a Shared World is a recent exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston in Texas, USA, curated by Hao Sheng. In this special exhibition, Sheng presented the Xuzhou Collection of Buddhist Art, an extraordinary collection of pan-Asian Buddhist sculptures on long-term loan to the MFA, across five galleries —Samsara, Impermanence, Karma, Compassion, Awakening. It encouraged visitors to journey through a cycle of contemplation: from the origins of suffering, through a diagnosis of the historical patterns and actions that brought us to today’s crisis, to a call for collective awakening in response. These ancient teachings emerge not as distant doctrine but as living guidance—instructions for the choices still ours to make, and reason for hope that we can make them well.
Similiar to the exhibition, this public talk too celebrates the life of Robert Hung Ngai Ho, C.M., O.B.C. (1932-2025), the founder of the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global. The Courtauld’s Ho Centre for Buddhist Art and Conservation was founded in 2013.
Organised by Dr Sujatha Meegama, Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Senior Lecturer in Buddhist Art History, The Courtauld.
Speaker
Hao Sheng is a Consulting Curator of Asian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he oversees the Xuzhou Collection of Buddhist Art and develops exhibitions bridging historic Asian art with contemporary concerns. Educated at Harvard and born in Shanghai, Sheng previously served as Wu Tung Curator of Chinese Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2004–2012). In 2026 he organized Buddha | Nature: Five Dialogues on Our Shared World, an exhibition placing contemporary art in dialogue with historic Buddhist masterpieces to contemplate climate change and published Approaching the Buddha: Transmission and Transformation with Yale University Press. When he is not curating, Sheng is a studio potter.
