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!

Conservator Shiho Sasaki experimented with a combination of funori and gelatin to create a consolident that could be painted onto the pigment, to hold the pigment in place. She had experimented with a range of materials, generally different types of seaweed with gelatin, and the winning combination turned out to be gelatin with a different kind of seaweed, imported from Germany. That’s what she’s using at the end of the video as she paints the consolident that starts out shiny and dries to matte.

The funori, however, was put to a different use. Shiho cooked it into a very weak glue that held the “band-aids” to the front of the painting (the tiny white strips seen in the video), holding paint pigment in place so that she could patch holes from the back side. This glue is so delicate that at the end of those three critical days of patching, the front-side “band-aids” — actually called “bridges” — just fell away without damaging the pigment.

Damage control is a big part of conservation. Check out how Conservator Mark Fenn replaces broken/lost portions of a piece of furniture, also part of the Emerald Cities show. It’s “kinda like your dentist”!

How much do I love Japanese cinema?  Don’t get me started.   When I lived in Los Angeles, the only person who went to more screenings of the American Cinemateque’s Japanese Outlaw Masters Series was Quentin Tarantino.  I’m not entirely sure he didn’t set up camp in the parking lot, calling out for delivery so he didn’t have to miss any of the yakuza-psychedelic-bushido bounty.

Maybe that’s a little hyperbolic, but whatever.  Anyhow, I’m working hard at re-watching as much of the samurai canon as possible in advance of finalizing our DVD orders, and I realize that somehow I haven’t seen everything.  How could that be?  Actually, I’m relieved that there are still treasures to be discovered.  And the ones I’m revisiting?  I still love my favorites and can happily find new details over which to obsess.

I’m sure my colleagues will have plenty to say about cinema and our film series, so I won’t belabor the point.  Suffice to say, I could tell how hard it was to keep it to the essentials–by all means read about it here.

But I just have to mention one I hadn’t seen in years.  It stars the dreamy Nakadai Tatsuya and it’s called Kill! What more do you need?  The 1968 chambara showcases a nice Spaghetti Western-slapstick styling that doesn’t detract from the action sequences, but there’s also a sneaky underlying notion that the life of a samurai is less than ideal.  Perish the thought…

Program details will be posted on the website soon, but if you wish to save the date, he will present on June 12 and June 13.

May Target Sunday (our monthly free day) at the museum, around 4pm or so. Our very special guests, Lopen Netem and Lopen Gyem, are monks from Bhutan who have been here since February to protect the sacred artworks in The Dragon’s Gift. Throughout the run of the exhibition, visitors have been privy to their daily purification rituals for the objects, as part of our artists-in-residency program, AsiaAlive.

Here, the charming monks have attracted quite an inquisitive crowd of diverse folks, demonstrating the stirring sounds of an instrument (sorry, I don’t know its name!). The infectious energy, folks’ curiosity, and monks’ sweet smiles of sharing and pride all make for a somewhat poignant moment.

And some photos:

If you’re around, come by and say “Kuzu zampo” (hello!) to our special guests. The show closes on May 10.

Only six days remain in the run of our exhibition The Dragon’s Gift: The Sacred Arts of Bhutan, and I think everyone at the museum will be sorry to see it go. The visiting Bhutanese monks, Lopen Neten Dorji and Lopen Gyem Dorji, have been wonderful. Visitors can observe them performing daily purification rituals and prayers (puja) for sacred objects in the exhibition at 11:00 and 3:00 on most days. They have also created two beautiful sand mandalas. A detail from one is shown above. Remarkably, the monk spreads the sand for the mandalas using only his fingers.

To see more, visit our Bhutan Flickr set.