The number two best seller at Asia Books in Bangkok’s international airport is the Asian Art Museum’s Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam and Burma 1775-1950. We’ll keep working to get the top spot!

Better to let a photograph do the work.

Pandaphants. AFP/Getty Images

Here are some of the samples of art activities from the museum’s awesome Education team. My current favorites are Japanese Teahouse and Thai Spirit House making, since they appeal to my sense of accomplishment. For more fun activities, please see the museum’s family program page.

Enjoy!

Museum staff enjoy a tour of Emerald Cities with curator Dr. Forrest McGill.

This past Friday, Chief Curator Forrest McGill took the staff of the Asian Art Museum on a tour of Emerald Cities. Such staff tours are a bit of a tradition after each exhibition opening — with all the busy schedules around here it can be surprising hard to find time to actually look at the art!

Guided tours are a great way to experience an exhibition because they are often full of the casual asides and colorful anecdotes that don’t make for official label copy. Friday’s tour included long digressions on the social meaning of footwear in Burma, jovial Thai wordplay, and the always intriguing discussion of what’s with all the silly painted rabbits?

Curators aren’t always on hand to tell these tales, but our fabulous museum docents make equally lively guides and are dying to dish out some juicy details to your waiting ears. We have docent-led 45 minute long tours of Emerald Cities taking place place daily at 12:00 pm and 2:00 pm, and all tours are free with admission. How good a deal is that?

Museum staff, led by Dr. Forrest McGill, admire the mythical goose from Emerald Cities.

The best time to visit is now. This exhibition had a relatively modest PR budget, so its opening was softer than that of some other shows. But everyone I’ve talked to who has seen it says it is fantastic. That means it will be a word of mouth show, where attendance is likely to build as time goes by. Visit soon if you like a little elbow room.

Okay, fair warning: as you may have gathered, I like this show, and what follows are excerpts from and links to some of the press and online reviews (and a couple of videos), which I hope might convey something of the quality of the show. If a litany of praise is not your thing, then you can stop reading here. But if you’re considering visiting and want to hear what others are saying, then read on . . .

So here’s a rundown of some of the early reviews:

• The San Francisco Chronicle says that the Doris Duke gift has provided the museum with “a trove of Southeast Asian artifacts that has given the institution a depth in this collection area unique among American museums,” and it notes that “the exhibition, and the glorious catalog that accompanies it, mark the completion of that marathon of remedial work.”
• Continuing the conservation storyline, the Wall Street Journal tells the story of how “Some of the Buddha paintings and gilded bronze sculptures that are part of a major upcoming exhibition at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco took an unusual detour en route to the museum: They spent decades in storage in a shooting gallery at tobacco heiress Doris Duke’s New Jersey mansion.”
• The New York Times reports that “in galleries painted smoky lilac, charcoal or bright green, inlaid glass chips gleam on upholstered benches, shadow puppets of monkeys fight demons and princes ride elephants on cloth paintings.”
• The San Francisco Examiner praises “fascinatingly detailed paintings of royal hunts, historical tableaux, legends and Buddhist images. A particularly haunting work is the Burmese gilded wood statue of the monk Shariputra, the body leaning at a strange angle, every detail of it and the robe signifying something.”
• Bay Area ArtQuake says that Emerald Cities is “another beautifully organized, elegantly presented exhibit with a catalogue that’s a ‘must buy.’”
• There has also been online video coverage, such as this report from ABC7 (which calls the show “spectacular”)

• and one from View from the Bay (which I’m having trouble embedding, so follow the link).

There’s your quick rundown. (Apologies to reviewers who I missed in my roundup of reviews.) Judge for yourself. Personally, I think this is a sleeper that shouldn’t be missed.

While wandering the museum this week, you may notice lots of activity on the ground floor outside of our special exhibition galleries. Although the majority of Emerald Cities activity is happening behind screens and closed doors — accessible only to exhibition staff — we do have a small teaser in the works. Two metal sculptures from the show will visibly grace North Court starting this week. 

Above, museum preparators secure one of these works of art,  a mythical bird-woman crafted in bronze to a pedestal that will be located outside of Hambrecht gallery.

You can learn more about some other bird-people featured in the exhibition in a previous post from Xensen. In the meantime, keep an eye on this blog for some more behind-the-scenes dispatches from Emerald Cities.

It’s a much-repeated joke in Burma that George Orwell wrote not one but three books about Burma.  His Burmese Days showed Burma during the British Raj, while 1984 and Animal Farm neatly summed up the totalitarian regime that turned one of the richest countries in Southeast Asia into one of the poorest.

This is my rather roundabout way of saying that if you don’t have plans for Sunday or Monday, please go to the Red Vic Movie House to see Anders Østergaard’s Burma VJ.  I haven’t yet seen it, but a friend who exhausted herself at the last Sundance Festival said that it was probably one of the best docs she’d seen.

Usually I eschew pushing media I haven’t experienced firsthand, but the trailer gives me the shivers.  Sadly, it also reinforces the truth of the sick Orwellian joke that has been visited upon the people of Burma for too long.

This will be no passive experience, as the Burmese American Democratic Alliance and the Buddhist-inspired Clear View Project will be on hand after each evening screening for what surely will be an intense Q&A.

Please set us know what you think in the comments if you do go!

No, actually it is contract conservator Emy Kim finishing the cleaning and consolidation of the surface of an elaborately lacquered, gilded, and inlaid table from nineteenth-century Siam that will be on view in the Emerald Cities exhibition.

She wears a respirator for protection from the fumes from solvents used in the cleaning.