Let the Museum Come Alive
Phenomenal Museum is a live, guided experience that restores the museum’s original Greek meaning (mouseion): to sit with the Muse.
Phenomenal Museum dissolves the distance of the modern museum, guiding you into an immediate, felt relationship with the objects that call to you.
Reconnect with Art
Through intuitive exploration and collective storytelling, you awaken imagination, discover new ways of perceiving, and connect with others in an “interspace.”
Activate through Creative Play
Experience Museums Differently
Through guided visualization, attentive looking, ritual listening, and collaborative play, you learn to sense the hidden stories, energies, and meanings that live inside each object.
Phenomenal Museum at the MET- Feb 22- 28
- No art background needed.
- No meditation experience needed.
- All you need is curiosity and an openness to play.
Phenomenal Museum Activations Have Taken Place at
The Modern Museum Has Lost its Muse
Most people visit museums hoping for inspiration, but walk out feeling drained of energy.
Why?
Objects are kept behind glass
Spaces are designed for silence, distance, and decorum
Cultural objects are removed from their original context and mediated by “experts”
We’re encouraged to observe but not to feel
Beauty becomes something we look at, not something that transforms us
We keep most of our thoughts and feelings to ourselves
You enter with curiosity.
You leave with sensory fatigue.
The power to create feels further away.
Phenomenal Museum Returns the Museum to its Original Function
Phenomenal Museum is an immersive, ritual-based experience that:
Opens your perception
Awakens attention and inner listening
Transforms art objects into guides
Makes creativity feel alive again
Restores relationship between people, land, art, and story
Connects us to others around us
Instead of looking at art from a distance, we enter into relationship with it.
Instead of looking at art in isolation, we connect to it through each other.
Instead of being spectators, we become channels.
The Shift Phenomenal Museum Creates
Current Museum Experience
Art is at a distance
You follow a map
You read its label
The museum is a space of observation
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Phenomenal Museum Experience
You meet art directly
You follow what calls you
You engage with its presence
The museum becomes a space of relationship
Inside the Phenomenal Museum Experience
Every session follows a clear flow, shaped by the unique energy of the group.
1- Grounding Ritual
It all begins in a quiet space, inside or outside the museum, where we meet and create a sacred space of play.
This includes a guided meditation that introduces us to the spirits of the land we sit on, the spirit of the museum as an institution, and our own Muses
2- Entering the Galleries
We then move into the museum and follow resonance, finding objects that connect with what emerged in the opening meditation.
3- Speaking the Object
We take turns looking at and speaking about the objects that called to them, giving voice to memory, presence, and imagination.
4- Closing Ritual
Sessions end with a closing ritual shaped entirely by what emerged in the “interspace” created by the group.
5- Every Session Is Unique
Because each group brings different transmissions, no two Phenomenal Museum sessions are ever the same. The structure shifts according to the contributions, energies, and stories that arise.
Phenomenal Museum at the MET- Feb 22- 28
- No art background needed.
- No meditation experience needed.
- All you need is curiosity and an openness to play.
“Phenomenal Museum made a big impact on me and how I approach not only art in museums and galleries but also random objects on the streets of the city, which is essentially one huge living, breathing museum. It gave me a different relationship with what I was looking at, where I was, what was around me, a one-on-one connection with items and elements that I have seen and hustled past dozens, hundreds, or thousands of times without giving them a second thought.” - Mark Rifkin
The Artist, Lineage Holder, and Cultural Steward Behind This Work
Gong Jie Xi/Jessica Kung
Gong Jie Xi/Jessica Kung, the creator of Phenomenal Museum, is a devotee of Vedic wisdom, a student of Vastu shastra, a practitioner of Bhakti yoga, a lineage holder of Vajrayana Buddhism, and co-founder of the Longhaus ecosystem.
She is also an artist, teacher, and the co-author of Basic Sanskrit for Yogis as well as The Muse and the Mountain, a forthcoming book on creativity as a spiritual path and the sacred origins of the Museum.
Her work reflects her identity as someone whose lineages straddle various traditions—as the daughter of Chinese immigrants to the United States, whose studies in the history of art and architecture at Yale with Vincent Scully and Kent Bloomer have informed and been informed by her twenty years of experience practicing and teaching Vedic and Buddhist wisdom.
Her thesis on ancient Indian architecture at Yale was the beginning of what has become her life’s work to reintegrate the practices of art and architecture with the spiritual practices in which those disciplines were once embedded, and thus to regenerate cosmos.
Phenomenal Museum at the MET
Your contribution enables Phenomenal Museum to become a regular public offering at The Met and to take its first steps as its own foundation.
Photo by Max Borenstein
“You are invited to engage with the objects as ritual objects. We create a ritual container, where we’re not tourists: everyone is empowered to activate the ritual process within that object. People have a lot of preconceived ideas of what they need to do in a museum, so we strip those away.” - Jessica Kung