Brand new, you’re retro

I’ve an admission to make: I’ve been playing a little game, waiting for someone to call me out on the fact that I’ve placed a book of 17th century paintings in a section reserved for contemporary South Asian art.  But you’ve got to admit: on the surface, it’s not an easy call.

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Sneak peek: Shanghai, the catalogue

Readers of this blog are among a select group who can see the catalogue for our upcoming Shanghai exhibition (opening February 2010) in its early stages.

Even as we are proofing color on Emerald Cities, we’re editing and designing Shanghai. As part of this process we created stylized characters for the word Shanghai. The image at right shows them on the half title page (p. i) of the book.

I don’t feel ready to show the cover, and all of this is still tentative and subject to change, but I feel good about the direction the design of this book is going. So I am going to show a few spreads in the hopes you might find them of interest. They also offer some of the first views we have made public of the art that will be included in this exhibition.
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Emerald Cities: The Catalogue

Some of the Asian Art Museum’s books are designed by our very small in-house staff, while others are outsourced. This one was designed by Tag Savage of Wilsted & Taylor, and it is a delight.

One of the issues we regularly encounter with the museum’s publications is that most American designers are strongly influenced by a Japanese aesthetic, while they are likely to know little about the design aesthetics of other Asian cultures. Even within the East Asian area, for example, we must often correct an initial Japanese orientation in designs of books on Chinese or Korean subjects.

So when it comes to nineteenth-century art from Burma and Siam, most designers come at the project from a starting point that is very foreign to the topic.
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Gilt-y pleasures

Even as the museum is gearing up for the opening of Lords of the Samurai in a few weeks, many of us are working on upcoming shows. Here Katie Holbrow, head of conservation at the museum, is working on a gilded object for Emerald Cities: Arts of Siam and Burma, which will be on display from October 23, 2009 through January 10, 2010, in our Lee, Hambrecht, and Osher Galleries on the main floor. This exhibition, which is drawn from the museum’s own collections (about 70 percent of the works were the result of a recent donation from the Doris Duke foundation) has involved the most extensive conservation work that I can remember. Many of these objects are decorated with gold, silver, gems, or glass, and, thanks to the work of the conservators, they really sparkle (wear shades)
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