You’d be forgiven for imagining the cover of Tantra Song a study on Ellsworth Kelly’s Stele I, pictured here in SFMoMA’s rooftop garden.

Or perhaps that the above painting recalls Kazimir Malevich or El Lissitzky, two great Suprematist artists of the early 20th century Soviet avant-garde.

Happening upon the paintings in 1970s Paris, the French poet Franck André Jamme was moved to discover their origin.  So inspired was he by the fact that these paintings contained the freshness and composition of 20th century work, he traveled to Rajasthan to study their origin (with disastrous results).

Art history is littered with such stories of accident and chance, of artists from disparate cultures finding reference and inspiration.  Tantra Song does what my favorite kinds of books do, drawing together two distinct traditions, affirming that the walls between worlds are far more permeable than we imagine them.
It’s the “two great tastes that taste great together” school, and lest you think this is scholarly stuff, the publisher, Siglio, points out that the book possesses some rather serious popular appeal.

You can read more over at Maria Popova’s addictive culture blog, Brain Pickings, or drop by the museum store to take a look at the book and talk French poetry–and yes, I do have the best job in the world.

As the entire store consists of floor-to-ceiling windows, giving objects their best angle has always been a challenge.  We’ve embraced the challenge, covering the windows in a custom vinyl wrap.  Take a look in our design books and you’ll find the source is an Indian textile motif.

We’ve paid special attention to the fact that not everyone’s going to want something specifically related to the Maharaja exhibition, and that maybe you’re traveling for the holidays.

Small, handmade, and very touchable: these glass pebble vases from Sugahara Glassworks are meant to resemble river stones, smoothed by water.  The best part?  The hand-blown vases are only $24.

Maybe you’ve seen the Maharaja exhibition and are looking for something a little shinier?

These nickel silver critters from Cambodia are $20, fit in the palm of your hand, and are actually boxes.  I’m a big believer in truly personal gifts, so tuck in a surprise message for your giftee to discover (especially helpful if you can’t afford to place the Maharaja’s jewels inside).

And it wouldn’t be a South Asian exhibition if there weren’t bangles.
Last year, our education department brought in over 21,000 students, teachers, and parents for school programs–for free.  You better believe that kids who only have a couple allowance dollars to spend are going to be able to afford something in the museum store.

Not to sound too much like a Public Service Announcement, but all of this matters a lot.  The best part about shopping at the museum store comes when you realize that you’re not just buying gifts–you’re supporting artists, communities, and the programs and exhibitions of the Asian Art Museum.  A meaningful gift that has a story–what more could you ask for?

Little-known fact: if you’re not a member, you can always access the museum store without paying admission.  Talk to the nice people at the admission desk, tell them you want to visit the museum store, and come say hello.

Although you might guess that things around the Museum are winding down–we’ve less than a month of the Bali exhibition left–think again.

The rare opportunity to see noted puppet master I Wayan Wija brings an added benefit: Wija has brought a number of his puppets and miniatures, several of which will be available in the Museum Store through his Asia Alive residency, which runs until August 28th.

Current favorites include the frogs and lion (with wagging tail), and quite a few of the miniatures, which are essentially small, unmounted paintings done in the style of the wayang (puppets).

Ratih, the Balinese goddess of romantic love, lust, & everlasting pleasure

And then there’s my personal favorite:

If you can’t make one of the performances or talks, stop by the Museum Store to see the work of one of the world’s greatest living masters.

When someone mentions Bali and Java, what do you see?  Some speak of impossibly verdant jungle broken by blue expanses of sea and sky, sharp-toothed deities in wood and stone, dancers dripping with gold ornament, the press of tourists.

Perhaps because I have never visited Indonesia, I tend to think of its art and craft, the dislocated souvenirs of Paradise.  Like the pieces on view in the galleries, they’re my link to places I may never visit, and so become microcosms of a word-of-mouth world.  But there’s one thing I don’t need imagination for, and that’s batik.

One begins by drawing on silk or cotton with wax, and then dying the fabric.  You draw again, and dye again, creating another layer of ornament and color, picking up where the last design left off, incorporating new motifs and textures.
Like a lot of us around here, I like to DIY (or rather, Do It Myself), and I taught myself how to batik with both cap and tulis.  The block that you see above is a cap, or batik stamp.  This contrasts with the technique of tulis, literally meaning “written.”

Of course, saying I’ve done batik is a little like saying “I know how to cook,” which should not imply that I’m French Laundry caliber.  Although it was fun (and messy), I never got anywhere near the level of skill of the Language of Cloth artists, whose work will be available for purchase at the Museum Store’s July 15th & 16th trunk show.

Although ostensibly the owner of Language of Cloth, Daniel Gundlach is an artist in his own right, collaborating with batik artists, innovating and riffing on traditional techniques and blurring the line between craft and art.  We received word that he’s put together what he considers his finest collection of batik for the trunk show, including both cap-printed and tulis cloth.

A substantial component of the work we do with artists and vendors involves translating the stories of people, places, and art; with the pictures that Daniel has sent us, we can show you another facet of this world.

"With Asif in Pekalongan, I collaborated on a series of scarf designs that use his extensive collection of cap on habutai silk. I hope these can be offered at a price that will make them especially attractive."

"Bowo in Cirebon specializes in batik dongeng (story batik) and is working on a batik depicting the plight of the oceans."

" Hartono, whose work you have in the store already, has produced a number of beautiful shawls on a lovely raw silk from Cambodia, and is still working on another collection of new scarf designs."

To learn the full story, you won’t want to miss this event.  And for those who prefer silver to silk, Joshua Smith will be in attendance with his Indiri Colection of modern Balinese jewelry.

Trunk Show and Sale: Hand-Drawn Batik from Java, Sterling Silver Jewelry from Bali
Friday, July 15 & Saturday, July 16
10:00 am – 5:00 pm
Classroom
Free admission

For more information and to get a sneak peek at additional images, visit the Museum Store’s events page.

But thanks to the Bali exhibition, tigers are still making a strong showing.

If you, like me, can’t get enough of the bared fangs and bugged eyes of Bali’s critters, don’t miss a rare opportunity to see an open rehearsal of I Made Moja and Gamelan Sekar Jaya’s The Creatures of Balinese Mythology.

The (free!) show starts this Thursday, March 3rd, at 6PM, and tickets for the March 11th and 12th performances can be purchased here.

Apologies to all my rabbit friends–but until such time as someone shows me a fierce bunny, it’s all about tiger pride.

In order to read a Chinese newspaper, around 4,000 characters must be committed to memory.  According to one of my favorite professors who spent time in China during the Open Door policy of the late 70s: “Give yourself about a dozen years to get a good grasp of it.”

Chinese, for anyone who has studied it, is a highly complicated language that requires a reader to quickly glean from the root (or radical) some piece of meaning.  Consider that every foreign concept that comes into China requires a new word.  The word for computer, then, is not computer, but closer to “electric brain.”  Try this link for a clearer breakdown of the process.

If this seems like a strangely digressive introduction of artist Xu Bing, who will be speaking at the Museum this Friday, maybe you don’t know Xu’s work.

His father taught at Beijing University, and his mother was a librarian, but because he was born in 1955 at the cusp of the Cultural Revolution, the idyllic world of the scholar’s son was short-lived.
“This is strange,” he says. “When I couldn’t read there were so many books. But when I was finally able to read, there was only one book.”*

Xu turned what could have been a disastrous situation to his advantage.  Because he studied calligraphy with his father, he became a skilled propagandist, and learned the value of meaning–and ultimately, the potential meaninglessness of words.

Possessing a deep sense of a lost world, Xu set out to make his Book from the Sky, a monumental work consisting of about 4,000 characters.  He painstakingly created a new lexicon of false characters, and from that lexicon a book that no one could read.  For anyone who has a passion for books and language, to be unable to decipher words begets crisis.
In China, where Mao’s single volume sustained a revolution, such a work would have obvious implications, especially in the light of the “simplified” Chinese character system that came about as a means of increasing literacy.

While I was in Washington, D.C., for a conference held by the American Booksellers Association, I took an afternoon to steal away to the Sackler Gallery, where Xu’s Monkeys Grasping for the Moon has pride of place in a great shaft of light.  The work is based on the folk story of monkeys who link arms to reach the moon in a pool of water, only to see their goal disappear as they reach it.  For the sculpture, enterprising primates are replaced with the word for monkey in twenty-one languages.

It was strangely appropriate for me to be missing a panel on selling e-books.  One form of technology–in this case, the e-reader–is poised to threaten another mode of technology, an ancient one.  I don’t dare draw conclusions of a Maoist nature, as the books still exist, albeit in the form of zeroes and ones.  As long as books have pictures, I can tell myself we’re safe, although a very large number of the books we carry are literature, Asian cultural studies, histories: wordy tomes that are within the purview of tablet readers.
What I found in D.C. were questions–so many questions.  And like the monkeys who reach for the moon, I don’t know if I’m any closer to answers.

For further conversation and perhaps even a few answered questions, attend the lecture this Friday, January 28th, in Samsung Hall from 2:30 pm–4:00 pm (free with museum admission).

Something I’ve noticed about the Zhang Huan sculpture in Civic Center: it serves as an excellent meeting place.  If you tell your friends to wait for you in Civic Center, they’ll often be found fifteen minutes later, standing in U.N. Plaza.  If you tell them to meet you next to the massive, multi-armed statue, there’s little room for error.
In case you weren’t in the neighborhood last Saturday, the sculpture in the plaza was the meeting place for several hundred participants of Santarchy (aka Santacon).  My thanks to everyone for making my Saturday, it never quite feels like the holidays until I see this thoroughly San Francisco phenomenon.

But make no mistake, although the event originated here, we don’t keep the fun for ourselves.  Tokyo, Beijing, Singapore, Okinawa, Seoul–even Manama, Bahrain–all host their very own versions of Santarchy.  Hopefully no one got run over by any reindeer or naughty elves last Saturday.  Did anyone spot the Santas in the Museum on Saturday?

Willie Mays & Joe DiMaggio at the Asian Art Museum in Golden Gate Park

Every morning on my way to work, I cast a glance at City Hall to remind myself that I’m not dreaming.  The Giants flags still fly, the banners proclaiming victory remain, and the Lone Star flag that once flew above Civic Center Plaza has yet to be replaced, an irresistible target for fans.
The air has been a little sweeter, the populace friendlier.  Upon the heels of history, reminiscing is in order.

On the morning of the Giants Victory Parade, our museum’s librarian deduced that I was a Giants fan (an orange scarf that didn’t leave my neck for at least a month might have tipped him off).
“Did you know that when the Japanese Emperor visited San Francisco, he made a special request that Wilie Mays and Joe DiMaggio be invited to a dinner held in his honor at the old museum?” he asked, with a glint in his eye, knowing this stuff is gold to historians and baseball fans.

“I’m sure there’s a photo somewhere in the archives.”

Emperor Akihito, Mayor Frank Jordan, & Empress Michiko in front of the treasure wall

It’s no secret that baseball is a unifying factor between Japan and the U.S., and that San Francisco is ground zero for baseball diplomacy.  The now-Yomiuri Giants were named the Tokyo Giants in 1935 by City native and baseball great Lefty O’Doul.  The first post-WWII goodwill games played between the San Francisco Seals and Japanese All-Star teams were essential to normalizing relations between the two countries.
Curiously enough, it was baseball that nearly caused a breach in those tenuous relations, when in 1964 the Nankai Hawks sent Masanori Murakami and a couple other players to practice with the Giants’ minor league team in Fresno.  The managers liked Murakami’s pitching style–he was a young, powerful left-handed reliever–and took advantage of a loophole to send him to the San Francisco Giants, making him the first Japanese player to sign with a Major League Baseball team.

Antagonism and bad press over the sneaky deal reached such a pitch that the Japanese baseball commissioner was called in to mollify East and West: Murakami would finish out the 1965 season with the Giants before returning home to Japan.

Nowadays, Japanese players on MLB teams aren’t novelties, and are acquired in more aboveboard means.  We share the favor in the process of suketto, or extra help, by allowing U.S. players to aid Japanese leagues.

Somewhere, I’m told, there’s a photograph of the Emperor, Mays, and DiMaggio.
Should it surface, expect an update.  In the meantime, let’s enjoy this solidarity in orange.

The party in our front yard: everyone was invited!

“The year 1871 was not particularly important in the development of Shanghai as a physical place, but was noteworthy when it comes to historiography…the Oxford English Dictionary singles it out as the year during which “to shanghai” began to appear in newspapers.”

Jeffrey Wasserstrom,

Global Shanghai, 1850-2010: A History in Fragments

Currently enthralled with all manner of 19th Century appurtenances, San Francisco is home to a second golden age of handlebar mustaches and historic cocktails served in period-specific bars.  Luckily for 21st century patrons, the fascination is all surface: absent are the trapdoors and opium-laced cocktails that made the city’s storied drinking holes famous for shanghaiing.  Precious little romance was involved in the process, as quite a number of men died while being taken, and unseasoned civilians were just as likely to fall to a drugged drink or truncheon.  Once aboard, a man dared not tell how he came to be there–his hope lay in being able to jump ship or find his fortune at the end of the line in Shanghai.

Also called “crimping,” the system was essential to early San Francisco’s maritime trade for the simple reason that more money could be made from the land than from the sea.  A sailor shipping out of San Francisco could earn many times more than at any other port of call, yet very few chose seagoing toil when a potential fortune was to be found on land.  The shortfall was made up the hard way.

The practice was hardly unusual or mysterious–the British impressed enough American sailors into their navy so as to cause ill feelings between the two countries.  But in its inimitable way, San Francisco found a way to put its own mark on this ignominious history.

For San Franciscans, Shanghai Kelly may conjure the image of a sports bar at Polk and Broadway.  Today, the only potential danger at that bar comes from drunken pick-ups.  But there was in fact a Shanghai Kelly, and his bar was reputed to have been built at the intersection of either Pacific or Broadway (albeit a bit closer to the Bay).  So many fabulous stories are associated with the man that it is nearly impossible to separate fact and fiction.  Whatever the truth, Kelly successfully found employment for a great many men who were not otherwise disposed to go to sea.

The oft-recounted tale (with little or no basis in fact, but enjoyable nonetheless) is that three ships sat in the bay, unable to sail with partial crews.  The captains of these vessels were so terrible that no conscious sailor would willingly sign on for what promised to be a hell-voyage.

Enterprising businessman that he was, Kelly saw opportunity.  He hired a paddler and invited anyone who wished to celebrate his “birthday” to come along for the ride–drinks on him.  The next day, all three ships set sail with full crews, and Kelly’s reputation as King of the Crimps was sealed.

If you’re searching for a truly pedigreed history, The Old Ship Saloon at Pacific and Battery offers a direct line to the city’s dark past.  When I first visited the bar on the pretext of rumor (who doesn’t want to drink in the hull of an old ship?), I was a little disappointed to find a quiet bar–a nice-looking bar, all warm wood and big windows–but certainly no 19th Century three-master.

Nevertheless, the bar you see today is built upon the ruins of the Arkansas after it was hauled off of the rocks of Alcatraz (then Bird Island) in 1849.  A door was cut in its side, casks rolled in, and for many years it served as a cornerstone of crimping history.  Curiously enough, James Laflin, the Arkansas’ former cabin boy, tended bar in the saloon–and for the next 50 years sent men to sea with his special cocktails.

Wild measures for wild times were the rule, but by the turn of the 19th century the city was changing, trade began to shift from the old wooden vessels, and San Francisco was striving to be a little less Wild West and a little more Paris of the West.  Gradually, the Port of Oakland and the Port of Los Angeles supplanted what had been one of the busiest ports in the world.  As the great Chronicle newspaperman Robert O’Brien recalls the story as it was told to him by his predecessors, “the earthquake and fire of April 1906 in Frisco [sic] would wipe out the shanghaiing warrens of the city.  And they would never be rebuilt.”

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!