We Are Connected: Highlights from the USC Pacific Asia Museum Himalayan Collection

Oct. 17, 2026 – May 2, 2027

We live in a world teeming with beings, things, and forces of all sorts. We Are Connected offers you an opportunity to explore the various ways in which inhabitants of the Tibetan Plateau, the Himalayas, and Inner Asia relate to each other as well as to the animals, plants, mountains, and spirits around them through art and material culture. This focus on the ideas and practices of interconnectedness calls attention to compositions, motifs, and artistic media unique to Tibetan, Nepalese, Bhutanese, Mongolian, and related Indian and Chinese cultural regions while reexamining the region’s rich visual art traditions through the lens of environmental humanities.

The USC Pacific Asia Museum is home to a significant collection of materials from the greater Himalayan region encompassing both objects of ethnographic interests and works with aesthetic appeal that fit major categories of fine art in the West. The objects selected for this exhibition, many on display for the first time in decades, illuminate what it means to live together as humans. They show how people on the Tibetan plateau and beyond envision coexisting with other sentient beings, nonliving matters, invisible forces, and gods who are believed to inhabit and personify the natural world. In these works, interconnectedness was articulated through physical or symbolic interactions between different beings. The viewers were often active participants in these interactions as they handled and examined these objects in religious rituals and communal activities. When depicting contact and bonding in material mediums, artists and patrons invariably embraced an openness to think big and a willingness to give up seeing themselves as unique and all-important. The people of the Himalayas have long understood the benefits of detachment from their own exceptionalism on the roof of the world, integrating these lessons into their ways of life with imagination and purpose.

In learning about a distant, unfamiliar part of the world, this exhibition also invites you to think more deeply about how we are connected to each other as well as to our surroundings and inner spaces. Curiosity about others is a step toward self-discovery.

We Are Connected is curated by Sonya S. Lee, Professor of Art History, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and Religion in USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences. The exhibition is presented in conjunction with Gateway to Himalayan Art, organized and sponsored by the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in New York City. Special thanks go to Dr. Karl Debreczeny, Dr. Elena Pakhoutova, and Dr. Westin Harris for their expert assistance with the research on the exhibition.