Every year, thousands of visitors flock to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the largest museum devoted exclusively to the arts of Asia in the United States. Featuring more than 18,000 artworks, the museum's world-class collection highlights the unique material, aesthetic, and intellectual achievements of Asian art and culture. This book presents two hundred and thirty exemplary works spanning both ancient and modern times. Among its many treasures, readers will find a Japanese clay jar from 3000-2000 BCE, a Chinese bronze Buddha dating to 338, a seventeenth-century Indian painting from the Shahnama (Book of Kings), a mid-twentieth-century Korean wrapping cloth, and a new Thai work made from textile, window mesh, safety pins, and amulets. A collaboration between museum curators, artists, educators, and collectors, the book also takes an in-depth look at fourteen masterpieces selected for their beauty, rarity, and historical importance. Stunning full-color photographs and new texts—including a foreword by museum director Ja Xu—offer fresh perspectives on both ancient and contemporary objects. A handsome addition to any art history collection, this volume is an essential resource for museum visitors as well as anyone interested in Asian art.

This book begins with the understanding that, in addition to its aesthetic qualities, Asian art and material artifacts are expressive of cultural realities and constitute a 'visible language' with messages that can be read, interpreted, and analyzed. Asian art and artifacts are understood in their contexts, as 'windows' into cultures, and as such can be used as a powerful pedagogical tool in many academic disciplines. The book includes essays by scholars of Asian art, philosophy, anthropology, and religion that focus on objects held in ASIANetwork schools. The ASIANetwork collections are reflective of Asian societies, historical and religious environments, political positions, and economic conditions. The art objects and artifacts were discovered sometimes in storage and were sometimes poorly understood and variously described as fine art, curiosities, souvenirs, and markers of events in a school's history. The chapter authors tell the stories of the collections, and the collections themselves tell stories of the collectors. This volume is intended for use in many disciplines, and its interpretive structures are adaptable to other examples of art and artifacts in other colleges, universities, and museums. An online database of some 2000 art objects held in the ASIANetwork schools' collections supplements this book.

Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris examines a history of contact between modern Europe and East Asia through three collectors: Henri Cernuschi, Emile Guimet, and Edmond de Goncourt. Drawing on a wealth of material including European travelogues of the East and Asian reports of the West, Ting Chang explores the politics of mobility and cross-cultural encounter in the nineteenth century. This book takes a new approach to museum studies and institutional critique by highlighting what is missing from the existing scholarship -- the foreign labors, social relations, and somatic experiences of travel that are constitutive of museums yet left out of their histories. The author explores how global trade and monetary theory shaped Cernuschi's collection of archaic Chinese bronze. Exchange systems, both material and immaterial, determined Guimet's museum of religious objects and Goncourt's private collection of Asian art. Bronze, porcelain, and prints articulated the shifting relations and frameworks of understanding between France, Japan, and China in a time of profound transformation. Travel, Collecting, and Museums of Asian Art in Nineteenth-Century Paris thus looks at what Asian art was imagined to do for Europe. This book will be of interest to scholars and students interested in art history, travel imagery, museum studies, cross-cultural encounters, and modern transnational histories.

A thorough and stunning look at The MacLean Collection Asian Art Museum, which consists of more than five thousand objects, from Neolithic times to the present, focused in three media--pottery, bronze, and stone from primarily China and Southeast Asia. A selection of Chinese pottery from the MacLean Collection of Asian art, dating from the Neolithic period (ca. 10, 000-2000 BCE) to the Tang dynasty (618-906), providing insights into the material culture, belief systems, and social development of early to medieval China. Nowhere in the world has such a rich, distinguished, and continuous tradition of pottery production developed as in China. From the Neolithic period (ca. 10, 000-2000 BCE) to the Tang dynasty (618-906), the art of Chinese pottery making has developed as much in response to functional and aesthetic considerations as to technological improvement. The forty-eight objects selected from the MacLean Collection Asian Art Museum represent some of the most important stages of this unparallel tradition when the forms, the artistic styles, and the techniques of pottery making emerged, improved, and sophisticated. They also provide insights into the material culture, belief systems, and social development of early and medieval China. OFFICIAL MUSEUM COLLECTION: An inside look into the rare collection of Asian Art both achived pieces and those currently on display in the museum located in Chicago, Illinois PERFECT FOR ART LOVERS: With enthralling photography and it's sleek hardcover, this book makes an exquisite gift for museum and art lovers everywhere CURATED FOR YOU BY THE BEST: Authored by three of the finest doctors and curators of ancient, modern, and contemporary Chinese art and pottery

While readers will come away from Chinese Art with a nuanced understanding of Chinese culture, the volume is also a work of art in its own right—a must-have collectible for any devotee of Chinese art and culture. Assouline’s Ultimate Collection is an homage to the art of luxury bookmaking—the oversized volume is hand-bound using traditional techniques, with several of the plates hand-tipped on art-quality paper and housed in a luxury silk clamshell.

This is the biography of a set of rare Buddhist statues from China. Their extraordinary adventures take them from the Buddhist temples of fifteenth-century Putuo – China’s most important pilgrimage island – to their seizure by a British soldier in the First Opium War in the early 1840s, and on to a starring role in the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the 1850s, they moved in and out of dealers’ and antiquarian collections, arriving in 1867 at Liverpool Museum. Here they were re-conceptualized as specimens of the ‘Mongolian race’ and, later, as examples of Oriental art. The statues escaped the bombing of the Museum during the Second World War and lived out their existence for the next sixty years, dismembered, corroding and neglected in the stores, their histories lost and origins unknown. As the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum, the author became fascinated by these bronzes, and selected them for display in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. In 2005, quite by chance, the discovery of a lithograph of the figures on prominent display in the Great Exhibition enabled the remarkable lives of these statues to be reconstructed.

The collection forms the basis for The Asia Society, founded by John D. Rockefeller 3rd in 1956. Although small relative to other such collections (it comprises 285 objects), it contains a high proportion of acclaimed masterpieces and is especially strong in ceramics and sculpture. The text introduces the general reader to concepts and historical trends and incorporates scholarly opinions on attributions and dates. An introductory essay by Sherman E. Lee, the Rockefellers' professional advisor for the collection, discusses their motives and methods. Some 300 color plates visualize the works in this first catalog of the complete collection. 9.5x12" Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR