Rear view of the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA)

The Asian has had loans from our permanent collection on view at the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA) since February 1992. At that time SAMA, which opened their doors in 1981 in the remodeled historic Lone Star Brewery complex, had a collection of Asian Art which they supplemented by borrowing additional pieces for display.

In May 2005 SAMA opened the new Lenora and Walter F. Brown Asian Art Wing, a 15,000 square foot suite of galleries.  Over the years,  SAMA has continued to build their Asian art collection which has have grown to include more than 1,500 works from China, India, Japan, Korea, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, and Vietnam.  The collection spans nearly 6,000 years of history.

The Hindu deity Parvati, approx. 1200-1400. Southern India. Stone. The Avery Brundage Collection, B60S50+

Most of the loans from the Asian Art Museum were returned to San Francisco for the opening of the new Asian in 2003, but there are still five sculptures left on display in the SAMA permanent galleries. One of the sculptures is Chinese and the rest are South Asian and Southeast Asian.

My fellow registrars at SAMA

We recently revised the inspection trip to occur biennially. I enjoy visiting my colleagues at SAM and it is always interesting to see how the museum has evolved over the years.  This trip I was particularly pleased to discover the famous Riverwalk has been extended all the way to the museum.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Asian Art in San Antonio

"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.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Somewhere a Shanghai garden grows

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!

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Shanghai update

From behind the scenes of Shanghai, stylish qipao from the Shanghai History Museum are unpacked for condition checking. A total of five of these body-hugging garments, featuring rich fabrics and art deco inspired motifs, are included in the “High Times” section of the exhibition. First worn by fashionable women in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s, the distinctive qipao remains popular today.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Shanghai sneak peek – Qipao

Jades await condition checking at the San Francisco Airport Museums

Beginning the week of Christmas, the San Francisco Airport Museums (yes, the airport has a fully-accredited museum) will host The Resplendent Stone: Chinese Jades from the 18th-20th Centuries. Drawn from the Asian Art Museum’s extensive jade collection, this is the first of several exhibitions to be produced by the San Francisco Airport Museums with loans from the Asian Art Museum.

Staff from the Asian Art Museum and the San Francisco Airport Museums carefully examine each object upon unpacking.

Many of these jades will be familiar to long-time museum visitors — a number of them were featured in our 2007 exhibition Later Chinese Jades: Ming Dynasty to the Early Twentieth Century. At the airport, these works will now have a chance to bring delight to viewers who might not of had a chance to experience them at the Asian.

The Resplendent Stone will be on view until June 7, 2010 on the south side of the international terminal.

Three sheep, 1900-1911. Nephrite. The Avery Brundage Collection, B60J397. On view in The Resplendent Stone.

Once you’ve had your share of jade, be sure to check out a few of the nearly twenty other exhibitions that can be found throughout the airport. This winter they’ll have shows on everything from vintage pinball machines to ancient Mediterranean pottery to miniature airplanes. It might be just so fascinating, you’ll think—what flight?

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

A little holiday travel cheer

The exhibition, Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance, will open at the museum in February 2011. But like many of our exhibitions, years of work are needed to ensure that it is a spectacular success.

Many of the world’s best collections of Balinese artifacts are located in the Netherlands, at such prestigious museums as the Rijksmuseum and the Tropenmuseum, both in Amsterdam. This trip is what we consider to be an early inspection trip — our first chance to see in person many of the objects that Natasha has selected for the exhibition.

Curator Natasha Reichle and Senior Registrar Sharon Steckline measure objects for the exhibition Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance.

Deep in the bowels of Amsterdam’s museums we have been busy measuring, photographing, and studying these objects. By doing so we can evaluate their condition and consider how to best transport them safely to San Francisco, plan for any installation challenges, double-check dimensions and basic cataloging information, and of course get ourselves excited about the show.

Natasha and objects conservator Mark Fenn carefully assess the condition of each object.

We still have many days to go and more collections to visit. But everyone here has been so helpful in allowing us access to their objects, and for ensuring our smooth visit. And for feeding us well. This is definitely one trip worth making, and an exhibition worth waiting for.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Sneak Peek: Bali in Amsterdam

Objects wait for a final condition check before packing

Over the past week we’ve been busy packing up the show. This is always a process of carefully controlled chaos. On average, breaking down an exhibition takes less than half as long as putting it up. With another show to immediately follow, it’s a tight schedule and one with little room for delays.

Textile conservator Denise Migdail unmounts a banner from its support

The deinstallation process involves museum staff, representatives from lending institutions, and additional art handlers and packers. In just a few days the Samurai team deinstalled, condition checked, and packed more than 160 objects for their return to Japan. It’s was quite an effort.

Registrar Cathy Mano wraps lacquers for their trip home

With artwork safely out of the way, preparation crews are busy retrofitting the galleries for Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam and Burma. At the same time, other exhibition staff are busy planning the installation of our 2010 exhibition, Shanghai. We move quickly from one exhibition to the next, but I think that even through this haze of new activity, we will remember Samurai with a special fondness.

Travel crates lined up outside of the gallery, with curators Yoko Woodson and Melissa Rinne standing by

While all exhibitions are special, this one in particular has been among the hightest attended shows in the museum’s history. So A huge thank you to to the tens of thousands of visitors who have helped make Lords of the Samurai a resounding success, and to the staff and partners who worked to make this exhibition possible.

Goodbye Samurai, and safe travels home.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Goodbye Samurai

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.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Countdown to Emerald Cities

Given this notable collection, we were recently thrilled to be offered a full set of Javanese shadow puppets that have been tucked away in their original traveling trunk since before World War II. Now we normally don’t showcase new gifts until they have completed our lengthy and deliberate acquisitions process (a topic for another post some day), but because it will be a long time before we finish processing this gift and because they are just that cool, I thought a sneak peek might be in order.

This vast layer of shadow puppets is only the second of seven layers tightly packed into this trunk.

Why such a long time until we debut this set? For one, it is a really full trunk. There are seven layers of puppets, with sizes ranging from tiny daggers for the characters to hold, to giant horses for them to ride. The puppets can be packed tightly because they are flat. Each one is crafted of carefully cut leather decorated with paint and gold and supported by a thin handle of polished horn. In addition to the puppets, the trunk contains backdrop screens, noise-makers, and other performance accessories.

Chief Curator Forrest McGill admires an elephant puppet from the set.

Readying this set for the museum collection will involve researching each puppet individually in order to identify the character and the story that they belong to, to determine when and how each puppet was made, and to to ascertain the physical condition of each puppet. Because the trunk contains several hundred puppets, this process will be ongoing for many months and possibly years.

Lots and lots of puppets!

Once this inventory is complete, the registrars and conservators will design a storage strategy for the long-term preservation of the puppets (unfortunately, we will not be able to store them in their trunk forever), and begin planning for any immediate conservation treatments that they may require.

Senior Registrar Sharon Steckline, Head of Conservation Katie Holbrow, and Forrest McGill examine the backdrop and other accessories that accompanied the puppet set.

With all this to be done, it will be some time before this collection makes it to our galleries. But in the meantime, you can still get your puppet fix in a couple of places. Just this week we rotated the Indonesian rod puppets in the Southeast Asia gallery—the new selection focuses on characters from The Mahabharata (The Great Chronicles of the Bharata Dynasty). Our forthcoming fall exhibition Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam and Burma includes examples of both Thai shadow puppets and Burmese marionettes, and will be accompanied by educational puppet activities presented by some very special guests. And if you’re curious about what other puppet acquisitions may be brewing here at the museum, here’s a YouTube hint to enjoy.

Puppets from the collection (left to right): A princess or a court lady, perhaps 1900-1925, Burma, Gift of Dr. Vincent Fausone, Jr., F2009.5 (Emerald Cities); Shadow puppet of the demon king Ravana riding a chariot into battle, approx. 1850-1900, Thailand, Gift from Doris Duke Charitable Foundation's Southeast Asian Art Collection, 2006.27.115.2 (Emerald Cities ); Ghatotkacha (Gatotkaca), son of Bhima, approx. 1960, West Java, From The Mimi and John Herbert Collection, F2000.86.161 (on view in Gallery 11)

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

The Museum of Asian Puppetry

Just as with our regular gallery rotations, we rotate objects because they are light-sensitive. The list of sensitive objects includes paintings, textiles, lacquers, and most other objects composed of organic materials. However, a mid-point special exhibition rotation differs slightly from our permanent gallery rotations because the new objects have to fit into the existing thematic content and flow of the exhibition. With so many unique works on view, this can make object selection a little bit tricky.

Portrait of Hosokawa Shigekata (left) will be replaced with a Portrait of Hosokowa Tsunatoshi (right). When possible, we try and rotate objects of similar type, function, and subject. © Eisei Bunko, Japan.

Some rotations involve objects with similar functions but different forms, such as this Commander’s Baton (left) being replaced by a Folding Military Fan (right). Both objects are used to communicate on the battlefield. © Eisei Bunko, Japan.

Textiles are among the most light-sensitive of artworks. The large cavalry standard on the left will be replaced by the standard on the right for the second rotation. © Eisei Bunko, Japan.

With so many unique objects, sometimes no direct substitute is available. Curators choose replacements that support a theme or fit into the flow of the exhibition. For example, the leisure activities of the Daimyo are represented by a Go game board and go stone containers in the first rotation (left), and an Incense ceremony box and implements in the upcoming rotation (right). © Eisei Bunko, Japan.

Some objects rotate without ever leaving the gallery. For The Book of Five Rings (Gorin no sho), we will change each of the five scrolls to display a new section of text. Rolled up, the previously displayed sections will be safely protected from continued light exposure. © Eisei Bunko, Japan.

Because we prefer not to close the galleries during the rotation period, museum staff will be working their magic during the hours when we are normally closed to the public. As a result, the rotation will be spread out over several days. Over the next week or so, you may notice that some galleries have been rotated and others are still waiting their turn. You may even find a case to have a temporarily vacant spot. Don’t worry, it won’t be empty for long!

Please bear with us during this process. Because of the extreme delicacy and importance of many of these treasures, the rotation process needs to be undertaken slowly and deliberately. We are scheduled to have completed the rotation by the time that the museum opens on Tuesday, August 11. On that date, be prepared for a fresh look at Lords of the Samurai.

This is a post from: the blog of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Visit us at www.asianart.org.

Lords of the Samurai, Round 2