UPDATED A Rediscovered Treasure?
UPDATE: The entire backside of the stele has a whole grid of inscribed Chinese characters in very legible clerical script.
detail of back side
Celebrate India
By Saturday, August 28th, the city’s sweltering summer heat will yield to a more accustomed winter chill, so we recommend warming up with the Asian Art Museum’s Celebration of India.
Get moving with the Chitresh Das Dance Company, flex your mind and body with yoga gallery tours, sample Indian desserts and spices, and create your own works of art.
And since no fewer than five people have asked about it today, yes, Sanjay Patel will be presenting his new book, Ramayana: Divine Loophole. Check out his Gheehappy.com, or learn about his influences (he has excellent taste) and read an interview on Pixar’s site.
A huge new shipment of South Asian books just arrived in the Museum Store, so if the docents pique your curiosity, you can take some of the museum home with you. Namaste!
Meanwhile…
If you didn’t get enough qipao in the Shanghai exhibition (it is a broad survey, after all), I recommend you see what Softfilm was up to at the Hong Kong Museum of History. Nearly 300 examples of the classic dress are on view and not one that can be tried on–talk about heaven and hell.
Many thanks to Dave for the great photos!
Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Shikumen
We get a lot of crazy questions in the museum store, like “How much is that?” Ordinarily this is not an unusual question, given the nature of our endeavors, but in this instance patrons are pointing out Jian-Jun Zhang’s installation, Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Garden.
Even those who don’t follow the art market know that major Chinese contemporary art is priced out of the the means of most apartment-dwelling San Franciscans, so the question “How much is it?” is a question not asked casually.
tilt-shifting courtesy of TC
If you’ve seen the Shanghai exhibition, Zhang’s work is the one comprised of bricks from dismantled shikumen, as well as life-sized silicon rubber scholar’s rocks and an unsettlingly flesh-hued vessel. For those of you who require a little more background, see this earlier post.
Happy news for those of us who like to buy art and afford lunch, as Zhang has proven in a multiple charting the disappearance of old Shanghai. His Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Shikumen, consists of an enevelope of nine photographs of the rapidly disintegrating past and a wee paper boat to help you travel the waters of memory. Both the folded boat and envelope are fashioned out of a painted composite map of Shanghai showing the restlessness of the landscape. The best part? This artist’s work is $15.
(very not-to-scale)
There’s little chance that I’ll ever be able to buy anything that we exhibit in the museum–minus what’s in the museum store. I’ll take what I can get, until someone wants to gift me one of the great rubber scholars rocks.
Tiger, tiger
I have just discovered the only reason to want an iPhone. This impetus, strangely enough, comes from the V&A Museum’s Tipu’s iTiger App.
If you’re not up on the history of colonial inequity, let me explain. The life-sized wooden and mechanical tiger mauling a European unsubtly summarized the Sultan of Mysore’s feelings for East India Company. For the Tipu, the imagery of the great beast was an essential psychological trope in defeating the infidel British. He utilized the tiger motif in many facets of his rule, from the uniforms and weaponry of his “tiger soldiers” to coinage and standards.
After Tipu was killed defending his capital in the fourth and final Anglo-Mysore War in 1799, the automaton was taken as a sort of trophy by the East India Company and displayed in their India Museum for the next fifty years. Visitors were allowed to “play” the mechanism, which produced the sounds of a man being ravaged by a beast. Now in the collection of the V&A Museum, visitors are no longer allowed to play organ grinder. Obviously their staff had grown tired of requests to turn the tiger’s crank, hence the clever introduction of the iTiger.
The catalyst for this story, you wonder? My most recent score at a thrift store.
It's not a tchotchke--it's history.
Shanghai in a minute
Here’s an amazing time lapse video of Shanghai.
Beyond Good & Evil
It’s amazing what one finds when cleaning out the closet–even when that closet happens to be a photo-hosting site.
Since I’m at nearly 7000 images and can’t seem to find anything when I look for it, it’s time to do some tagging. A bit tedious, but a reasonable way to spend a slow Sunday morning, especially given my selective memory. The best part about going back in time? Discoveries like this picture I’d taken of a friend’s photograph from a trip to Indonesia (so meta!).
Whereas traditional wayang kulit (shadow theatre) is based on the great Hindu epics, the Ramayana and Mahabarata, this is wayang wahyu, a form that allowed the Jesuits to spread their word through a means more familiar to their Indonesian audiences. The piece to the right at first looks as though it is the usual kayonan (tree of life) or gunungan (holy mountain) , but look closely and you’ll discover some non-native imagery.
This is definitely not something you’ll see in our upcoming Bali exhibition, but a fascinating aspect of acculturation. I know a few readers have traveled in Asia–what are your favorite moments of cultural disparity?
Tag: Nancy Jacobs
Tag, round three: In this series, museum staff, artists, and guests answer a grip of questions about life, love, liberty and all that magic. The featured person then tags another with five more questions. It’s like transmitting a virus, but happy and fun. Up today is Nancy Jacobs, executive assistant to the director, tagged by Ken Ikemoto, school programs associate.
Do you collect anything or any type of experience?
I have an amazing collection of stamps in my passport! I save my old passports just because the visas and entry stamps are a wonderful reminder of the trips I have taken. And when I’m travelling, I try to find small boxes and have at least one from each place I visit. I look for a box that evokes the place it’s bought, is handmade and for practical reasons, it needs to be easy to carry. (That being said, I have gotten on airplanes with boxes large enough to elicit a look of exasperation from the flight attendants!) My favorites are a mother-of-pearl box that I bought in Thailand, a beautiful handmade metal box with silver inlay I bought in India, and a box from the souk in Marrakesh that turns into a bracelet.
I also have a collection of beaded belts I bought in tourist gift shops. The best one is from the Trees of Mystery: my rule used to be that they could cost no more than $2.50; that will show you long I’ve been collecting them.
If only Picard had visited the Asian Art Museum
In the third episode of season one of Star Trek: The Next Generation, titled “Code of Honor,” Captain Picard welcomes the Ligonian leader, Lutan, aboard the Enterprise. In the two screenshots below, we see Picard presenting, as a welcome gift, a clay horse sculpture of ancient China:
Picard identifies the sculpture as a Song-dynasty work of the 14th century (Data corrects him, claiming the 13th century). However, both of them are off the mark. According to my professional eye, this glazed horse should be from the Tang dynasty (618-907)–it is a quintessential Tang horse. Compare it with this one in the collection of the Asian Art Museum:
Notice the similarities in the glazing colors and the robust form of the horse. The horse was a prized animal in China, especially in the Tang dynasty when it represented the power and might of the empire. The Tang empire is considered to be a golden era in China’s history both in culture and in the military. So it makes sense that Picard would gift the noble Tang horse to Lutan, but I blame the writers of this episode for not having done their homework. They should have visited the Asian Art Museum!
Nine Lives
If I hadn’t committed myself to pressing matters of civic pride, I’d be at the Mechanics’ Institute on Wednesday to see William Dalrymple talk about his new book, Nine Lives.
Fascinated as we are with the way in which much of spiritual Asia has rocketed to the fore of economics and technology, the well-respected India hand seeks to explain the transformation with his usual elegance. The event starts at 6, find more information here
(If anyone goes, please fill me in)
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