A few days ago, I received a holiday card from an AsiaAlive alumnus, Japanese bamboo artist Tanaka Kyokusho. He also sent me a photo of his latest work, a fifty-foot-long dragon made entirely from bamboo.

Tanaka's bamboo dragon display in Tokyo.

Another Japanese artist, Paris-based artist Natsusaka Shinichiro, recently sent us the new year’s netsuke he created specially for the museum. This is his third year designing netsukes for our education programs; he previously created netsukes for the year of the tiger and the year of the rabbit.

Natsusaka's dragon netsuke is about an inch tall.

Unlike Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese communities, Japanese people celebrate the new year on January 1. This change from the lunar calendar was made during the Meiji Restoration Period, in 1873. Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese new year starts on January 23, 2012 (it changes every year according to the lunar calendar), so you will have three extra weeks to make new year’s resolutions.

Next Saturday, December 31, museum visitors can ring the new year in with our annual Japanese bell ringing ceremony, make their own netsukes at our family art activity, and welcome the Year of the Dragon in style.

Jakkai on His Recent Works

Art Through His Eyes

On Art School, Politics, and Free Time

About Art Speak
Art Speak is a multi-disciplinary youth engagement and job preparedness program featuring a dynamic learning environment, real world museum experience, and arts education practice. Art Speak offers training and stipends to three San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) youth in grades 10–12. Interns learn art production and multimedia skills, produce hands-on activities and content for family and public programs and the museum’s Education Resource Room, and create awareness of the museum’s programs through outreach to their peers. Interns are introduced to other museum departments and staff, learning about museum operations and careers, and develop their presentation and public speaking skills through interaction with the general public and schools and community groups. For more information: www.asianart.org/artspeak.htm

This Balinese folktale about a gecko provides another important lesson:

Especially for Teachers: For lesson plans on Balinese art and culture that coincide with the concepts expressed in the above videos, view the related Educator Resource Packet. In addition, hear these stories and more and explore related artworks with your students by scheduling a free storytelling school tour at the Asian Art Museum.

The series of events depicted in the scroll (left) comes from a northeastern Indian version of the Story of Rama (the Ramayana). As is typical of scrolls from Bengal, in northeastern India, the scenes unfold in a linear fashion. This painted scroll would have been carried from village to village by a storyteller-priest who who would narrate the stories in public performances. The scroll was unrolled scene by scene as the storyteller’s narrative unfolded. Such paintings not only served as visual aids but simultaneously affirmed the existence of the mythic world they represented. Moreover, the recitation of religious stories and the audience’s participation through listening and viewing were means by which worshipers could demonstrate their piety and accrue religious merit.

Especially for Teachers: Through the study of The Story of Rama (The Ramayana) as well as a broader view of the arts and culture of Bali, students can experience how the literary, visual, and performing arts can provide a lens through which to understand the world—and to reflect on their own identities and world views. Prompt your students to explore how artists communicate events and characters with the use of the Lesson: Epic Story Scrolls (Grades 5-8). In this lesson, students will work in groups to observe and describe scenes in the scroll, then compare the context of the scroll’s use with those of scrolls illustrating other epics. They will then create a biographical scroll from the perspective of a character in The Story of Rama (The Ramayana). View The Abduction of Sita (an Excerpt from the Ramayana) video with your students to provide additional context for this lesson.

Hinduism originated in northern India and moved to Southeast Asia through maritime trade. More than 1,000 years ago, evidence of Hinduism existed in much of Southeast Asia. Though Hinduism is still popular in Southeast Asia, the Indonesian island of Bali is the only place in this vast region where a form of it is dominant even today. One of the ways Hinduism spread was through the telling of the Ramayana, a 1,000-year-old Indian epic.

Especially for Teachers: Download the Ravana handout (pdf), for activities related to this object and the Ramayana (The Story of Rama) to conduct with your students in the museum or in your classroom. For related videos and curriculum guides, visit the Asian Art Museum on ArtBabble (a video site dedicated to art content) and the Asian Art Museum’s  Educator Resources page. We would love to hear your feedback on our new Art At-A-Glance format. Stay tuned: there are more to come!

Some questions to ponder as you watch:

• Can writing forms reveal information about belief systems? How so?
• Can writing be considered an art form? Why or why not?
• What are the similarities and differences between these two writing forms and that of languages you are familiar with?
• Can you make any additional connections?

Check out the conversation over at the Contemporary Jewish Museum: cjmvoices.blogspot.com

The museum is proud to host the participants in the 2011 National Chinese Language Conference organized by the Asia Society Partnership for Global Learning and the College Board in collaboration with the SF-based Mandarin Institute. The conference takes place April 14-16, 2011 at the Hilton, and our event is the evening of April 15.

Conference attendees include language teachers from all over the US, and they will be coming to the museum for an evening reception and showcase of our galleries and programs, including stories told in our galleries in Chinese by High School students of Chinese to elementary grade immersion program students.

The theme of the conference is: Connect, Innovate, and Lead!

Teachers will explore how:

• Technology and Innovation are changing the way our students learn language and engage in international collaboration.
• A World-Class Education is preparing the next generation in the U.S. and China for an interconnected future.
• Best Practices and New Directions are guiding quality instruction and enhancing student achievement.
• K–12 and Higher Education can collaborate on articulation, teacher preparation, and research.

They are accepting session proposals and registrations now at

http://sites.asiasociety.org/nclc2011/conference/

Bali Shortcuts: Ubud Cremation from Something Creative on Vimeo.

I am hoping the filmmakers who made this piece will give us permission to show it as part of our exhibition. In the exhibition, there will be a platform used for the actual burning of the animal coffin with the body inside, a ritual dagger that may have been used to cut open the coffin so the body may be placed inside, and a painting showing many of the cremation ceremonies.

Bull vessel for cremation

Before the museum blog started I created the Bali Art Blog to post about my trip to Bali and progress on our Bali exhibition. I was reviewing some of the comments there and thought this one would be of interest to the readers of the museum’s blog about the question of whether the museum should commission funerary arts as props for our exhibition. Gus Dark wrote:

please stop playing the sacred art with contemporary art which will causing Young generation in Bali or other place will misunderstanding or misinterpreter it, until the art itself losing it meaning, losing it sacred and “magical feeling” or we Balinese call it “TAKSU”. Feel free to search and create something new based on Balinese art but please don’t put the sacred art into modern or street art things, these arts have their own place… and we all have to respect it. thank you for your concerning about bali, I love Bali and Bali will always loves you..

We talked to lots of folks about the idea of commissioning a bull-shaped coffin used in Balinese cremations for display in the exhibition. We are borrowing an impressive, carved wooden cremation platform, which was never used, and thought we needed to complete it by having the bull inside. In the photo above the platform is very tall with white columns. It usually is burned with everything else in the cremation. While it certainly would have been possible to have an artist create a bull coffin, we decided not to go ahead with this on the advice of our Balinese advisory committee who shared similar sentiments to Gus. One person said that it was not a good idea to create a coffin unless you had a body to go into it. Makes a lot of sense, don’t you think?

Work on the videos for the Bali exhibition are in full court press at the moment. I have been working with video editors Michael Rohde (SF based) to develop six videos to play in the gallery spaces and short clips for the handheld media tour,  and Martin Percy (London based) to create an interactive video kiosk. Why are we going so heavy on video with this exhibition? The key reason is our desire to convey in an immersive way the integration of art, ritual, and performance in Bali. Today we trekked out to Richmond to interview local dancer Kompiang Metri Davies. We asked her to wear her traditional Balinese temple best for the camera, but when the interview was done she had changed back into her regular around-the-house outfit of Indian looking tunic and slacks. Kompiang told us about her memories growing up in Ngis, a remote village in eastern Bali, how she came to learn dance (despite her parents’ resistance), symbolism of the various pieces of Balinese dance costume, how the mask dances frightened her as a child, dancers entering trance state, the simple bull-shaped coffins made in her village for cremation, and about making daily offerings. You may hear excerpts of her interview in the audio tour and on the introductory video. She will perform purification dances on opening day Feb. 25 and a mother-daughter dance work on Mother’s Day family festival on May 8, 2011.