This article revolves around the concepts of trans-border arrangement and transculturation and their significance to a critical theme in the British Museum today: cultural connectivity. Trans-border arrangement refers to displaying and classifying an object in museum space based on the object’s context of production as well as its relations with other objects and people; its transfer, gifting, collection, consumption, and appropriation. It represents, in museum space today, the circulation of material objects across cultural-geographical boundaries over a period of time in the past. To illustrate a trans-border arrangement, this article provides an empirical investigation of the multiple placements of Ming pilgrim flasks in the British Museum’s galleries of China, India, and Europe. This display scheme not only shows how the British Museum can accommodate the narrative of transculturation into its spatial configuration, but also how the institution of the museum can engage in the global turn in art history that blossomed in the late 1990s.

As one of the semi-permanent exhibitions of the Wereldmuseum (World Museum) in Rotterdam, the subject of "The World of Enlightenment" is to show the "teachings" of Japanese esoteric Buddhism. It is distinguishable from those religious exhibitions whose focus lies in introducing the religious materials based on an art-historical perspective or the classification of a defined style and historical period, as its scope sought to show the audience how the Japanese "secret teaching" is experienced "in practice," namely, in the ritual context. In order to engage museum audiences in the spirituality of Japanese esoteric Buddhist presented in this exhibition, the curator and museum staffs construct five temple-like structures to group the religious objects and highlight their usage in Japanese esoteric ritual. This exhibition review intends to present the special strategy that "The World of Enlightenment" employs to construct a sense of ritual scene to its audiences: certain installations are placed both inside and outside of the five temple-like structures to refer to the "metaphorical presence" of both the Japanese esoteric priest and worshiper, in so doing to make these "imagined" temple setups more "lifelike."