How Religious Destinations Innovate Tourism Models in Religious Personalization: An Evidence from Contemporary Art-Temple Collaboration

In response to the development of religious personalization, the old marketing strategies of most religious destinations have been unable to effectively promote their popularity in modern times. This article deeply explored how to use contemporary art to design religious destinations comprehensively and proposed an effective solution to enhance the popularity of religious destinations in religious tourism. We established an actor network in religious tourism with qualitative and quantitative analyses and took the Buddhism Yuan-Dao Guanyin Temple in Taiwan as a case analysis. We found temples to be the main actors in religious tourism networks and temple organizations to serve as their spokespersons. The successful obligatory point of passage (OPP) in the network was that “the religious performance of Yuan-Dao Guanyin Temple is a contemporary art style, and every subject who enters the temple field can obtain interests”. This is primarily formulated by the interaction between religion and contemporary art. The results show that adopting a contemporary art style in this case can successfully expand the popularity of the religious destination. Through the actor network model proposed in this paper, it can be used as a strategy for other religious destinations to improve religious tourism.