With the close of Poetry in Clay on January 8, the Asian Art Museum’s Korean galleries have once again become a work in progress. A collection of old friends — ceramic and metal works from the museum’s collection — are on their way back.

The reinstalled gallery will re-open this weekend, so be sure to take a moment to revisit your favorite Korean works.

But in addition to works from the collection, we have another treat on view. When the museum opened at Civic Center back in 2003, the Korean artist Cho Duk-Hyun excavated a pack of dogs on museum grounds as part of the Eureka project. Ten of these dogs were later given to the museum. As part of the Korean gallery reinstallation, we’ve let these dogs out of their storage crate for a brief romp. You can check the pups out and watch a video documenting their unearthing starting January 28.

Museum photographer Kaz Tsuruta photographs each dog on its way to the gallery.

Bonus Quiz: There are nine dogs in the gallery but ten in the pack that was given to the museum. Can you guess where doggy number ten is? Put your answer in the comments below.

Curator of Korean Art Hyonjeong Kim Han, registrar Cathy Mano, and exhibition manager Kelly Bennett wrangle Cho Duk-Hyun's dogs into the Korean gallery alcove.

Here at the museum, we were excited to see Chang’s name in the news because one of his paintings, Clouded Mountain, will soon go on view in our China gallery.

As a preeminent painter of twentieth-century China, Chang integrated modern sensibilities into traditional Chinese painting. In 1956 he made his first pan-European tour, at which time his eyesight began to deteriorate. During this time, he unexpectedly developed his most innovative painting technique of splashed ink and color. Clouded Mountains exemplifies the splashed ink technique. The poem, inscribed by Chang, reads:

I was in the mood to paint in the middle of night
My wife and son were awakened from their dreams
Ink overturned and running out of control
Emerging from the summer clouds a celestial mountain

Chang’s painting will go on view on January 24.

This video shows our preparations team building the belfry and hanging the bell ready for is ceremonial duties.

Here is what’s happening: we’re bringing Bali to you! Museum exhibition staff have been busy unpacking loans, condition checking objects, arranging cases, and even building a Balinese pavilion under our own roof.

We still have two weeks  until the exhibition opens to the public, but here’s a quick peek of what we’re doing between now and then.

Senior Registrar Sharon Steckline checks up on a set of gold earrings, held secure with their new custom mounts.

While the galleries are being prepared, borrowed objects are carefully unpacked.

After unpacking, objects such as this spectacular barong mask must be condition checked before installation.

Because of its large size, the pavilion in Vinson gallery was transported disassembled. Here it is being put back together.

Exhibition Designer Stephen Penkowsky supervises the placement of carved statues in Osher gallery.

The galleries begin to take shape as the objects move into place.

One of Jiro Okura's Mountain Lake screens is packed. Because of their great weight and the delicately affixed gold leaf surface, these screens present unique handling and transportation challenges.

Museum conservator Shiho Sasaki closely examines the condition of each screen before packing.

Museum preparation staff pack each screen in a custom travel crate. Before crating, the screens are protectively wrapped.

What’s next for our exhibition staff? We’re busy rebuilding the galleries for Bali: Art, Performance, Ritual. Where Beyond Golden Clouds was a spare and spacious gallery experience, Bali promises to be full of a different sort of energy. Keep tuned for sneak peeks as construction commences!

The Beyond Golden Clouds: Five Centuries of Japanese Screens exhibition has arrived from halfway across the country — the St. Louis Art Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago. Staff from each institution were required to accompany the shipments by riding on long-haul trucks for well over 40 hours. We are now installing the exhibition and the screens, and the galleries are really lovely. One of the most exciting pieces is contemporary, the From the Mountain Lake Screen Tachi Series by Okura Jiro; the screens in this series have gold foil pieces attached to them, and they leave some tiny pieces of gold foil in their wake. This is not normally what we like to see, but the artist created these screens with the intention of seeing them deteriorate over the years.

In a true collaboration, both lenders have portions of the screen and we have placed them together, and they are fantastic. The screens are a wonderful mixture of traditional and contemporary and I look forward to the public will be able to see them on Oct. 15.

"Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Garden" during installation.

Shanghai has been up a little more than a week, long enough for a number of media reviews, blog posts, and general discussion points to emerge. One piece that seems to elicit particular comment is Zhang Jian Jun’s installation Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Garden (2009).

Down in the shadowy basement and back halls of the museum services division, this is known affectionately as the piece with the bricks. Not just your garden variety red clay bricks, but some 3,000 antique grey bricks taken from the remains of buildings dating to the high-times of 1920s Shanghai, recently demolished to pave the way for new construction.

Bricks ready for unpacking.

Of course, bringing over 3,000 bricks from China is not as simple as dropping them off at the post office. Weighting in at over 11,000 pounds, the fifteen crates of individually packed bricks were flown from Shanghai to Los Angeles aboard a cargo plane, and then loaded onto a truck to San Francisco, accompanied by a museum registrar the entire way.

Museum preparators clean the surface of bricks to be stacked.

Because of earthquake concerns, the bricks stacked around the rock platforms needed to be secured against movement. With bricks fresh from a demolition site, this meant carefully cleaning the surfaces of loose debris so that adhesives could bond. As a result, the museum’s preparation team vacuumed a lot of bricks.

Zhang Jian Jun constructs his garden.

Each brick was carefully placed by the artist, who took advantage of the wide expanse of North Court to extend his installation in all directions. The completed work combines all those bricks with two pink silicone rubber scholar’s rocks (taihu), a silicone rubber vase, and tiny bits of artificial greenery emerging from the cracks. It’s an evocative statement about the transition between the city old and new, a theme our visitors will find woven throughout Shanghai.

A detail of the neon tube components of Shen Fan's installation "Landscape—Commemorating Huang Binhong—Small Scroll."

Are they straight or not? Preparator and lighting designer Evan Kierstead hangs two pairs of calligraphy scrolls by Zhao Zhiqian in Osher gallery.

Propaganda posters are prepared for framing in the museum's conservation center.

What’s scheduled for this week? More paintings, ceramic city-scapes and lots and lots of bricks!

Objects selected  for Shanghai include not only the 2-D paintings and works on paper that visitors might expect, but a wide variety of furniture, textile arts, video works, and contemporary installations by leading Shanghai artists. This variety of object types can be a challenge for our designer. In particular, the museum’s existing gallery spaces were not originally designed to fit contemporary installation art or to display video art.

As a result, various spaces around the museum have been receiving substantial Shanghai makeovers.

Windows to north court are covered with new walls to create additional display space.

The entirety of north court — a large open space between the special exhibition galleries that typically hosts education programs and  special events — is now an exhibition space that will be filled with large-scale installation such as Zhang Jian-Jun’s Vestiges of a Process: Shanghai Garden with its thousands of antique Shanghai bricks, and Can You Tell Me, Liu Jianhua’s collection of stainless steel books presenting meditations on Shanghai’s possible futures.

Hamon arcade, with new wall construction in process.

Adjacent to north court, Hamon arcade (the passageway behind the museum store that connects the north and south courts) has undergone structural changes that will allow for the installation of Liu Jianhua’s evocative porcelain cityscape Shadow in the Water.

In order to display  a selection of works by Shaghai artist working in video, the ground floor education resource room has been transformed into a viewing space. School groups will instead now meet in Tateuchi gallery on the second floor, where walls have been created to separate the space from surrounding galleries.

New walls receive a coat of paint in Osher gallery.

The regular special exhibition galleries — Lee, Hambrecht, and Osher — have also undergone major construction with new walls and platforms designed to best display approximately 120 works. Less visible throughout the galleries are more subtle changes, such as electrical upgrades to accommodate powered artworks and a revised flow plan for moving visitors through the new series of gallery spaces.

Crated objects are moved into the exhibition spaces once construction is complete.

All of these changes mean that the entire ground floor of the museum will be alive with art for the next seven months. For our regular visitors, the changes may be a bit disorienting at first. But for many, encountering new art in unanticipated spaces will be a distinctive part of the Shanghai experience.

Emerald Cities does not debut until October 23, but its installation is complicated by the concurrent deinstallation of Lords of the Samuari (ending September 20). This is not atypical — we try and keep the turn around time (or “dark time”) between exhibitions as short as possible. Since these two exhibitions share many of the same behind-the-scenes staff, the result is a whole lot of people running around with brains and workspaces messily split between Japan and Southeast Asia.

So here are a few pics of this ongoing mayhem, as museum staff work to complete as much Emerald Cities prep as possible before jumping into packing up Lords of the Samurai.

In one of our previous posts, we took a peek at a Burmese court costume being prepared for display in our conservation lab. Well it’s coming together nicely, with most of the mount completed and the pieces being fitted one by one.

Down by the carpentry shop, a steady stream of exhibition furniture — casework, pedestals, and platforms — continue to emerge. Once painted and placed in each gallery, these furnishings not only show off the artwork, they also are critical to defining the layout and flow of the exhibition.

Our mountmaking studio has been exceptionally busy, crafting a range of hardware to protect the artwork in the event of an earthquake.  Small objects are fitted with delicate wire mounts while larger sculpture — such as the mythical wild goose that will grace North Court, require more substantial support.

In the conservation lab, the large thai paintings on cloth that have been featured in previous posts and on our YouTube channel, are starting to move to the upright position as they are test-fitted to fabric covered display mounts.

This is just a small taste of what we’re up to behind-the-scenes. As we continue to approach the exhibition turnaround period, keep an eye out for more behind-the-scenes updates on Emerald Cities.