First, newly on view in the South Asian galleries is a recently acquired silver bowl featuring scenes of Zoroastrian rulers. Made in a Burmese silver shop for a well-to-do Parsi family, this impressive bowl measures more than a foot in diameter and was meant for use in an annual ceremony honoring deceased relatives.

Ceremonial bowl with Zoroastrian themes, approx. 1875. Burma. Silver. Acquisition made possible by the Zarthosti Anjuman of Northern California, Rati Forbes, Betty N. Alberts, and members of the board of the Society for Asian Art in honor of Past President Nazneen Spliedt, AAM# 2009.25

The events depicted on this bowl are well known in ancient Persian sculptures. Perhaps most notably, compare this bowl against the famous relief and inscription of Darius I located at the UNESCO World Heritage site of Bisitun.

Inscription and relief of Darius I at Behistun

Also newly on view in the South Asian galleries is a metal plate displaying an elaborate floral decoration. This is an example of the “bidri ware” produced in south-central India using a complex casting, engraving, inlay, and chemical process.

Plate, approx. 1700. India; perhaps Andhra Pradesh state. Zinc alloy with silver and brass inlay. Gift of Martha Davidson in memory of J. LeRoy Davidson, AAM# B86M12

Finally, In the Chinese galleries we just installed a ritual food vessel (gui) dating to the Western Zhou dynasty (1050-771 BCE). This particular vessel has a curious connection to Shanghai. According to curator Michael Knight:

“The inscription on this vessel tells us it was cast for someone named Zhui. A vessel of similar shape and also cast for Zhui appears in the 1892 hand scroll Illustrations of the Antique Collection of Kezhai, on display in the Shanghai special exhibition galleries on the first floor. There are at least four other vessels of the same shape with the same inscription, making it impossible to determine if the piece illustrated in the scroll and this one are the same.”

Ritual food vessel, approx. 900-850 BCE. China. Bronze. The Avery Brundage Collection, AAM# B60B1056

We’ve got lots more objects lined up! Keep an eye on this blog for news of additional gallery changes over the coming months.

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

In the galleries: a few additions

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.

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

Have you taken your daily tour?

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.

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

An Emerald Cities teaser

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

Governments, news organizations, and others around the world have struggled with the question of whether to use the name Myanmar (pronounced “myan-mah”) to refer to the country traditionally known as Burma.

Burma has been ruled by a repressive military dictatorship since a coup d’état ended democratic governance in 1962. After holding free elections in 1990, the government annulled those elections when it lost decisively. The government continues to hold more than two thousand political prisoners, including Aung San Suu Kyi, the leader of the party that won the 1990 election.

The military junta changed the name of the country to Myanmar in 1989, a year after thousands were killed in the suppression of a popular uprising. (They also renamed the city of Rangoon as Yangon.) While countries such as France and Japan, as well as the United Nations, have recognized the name change, the United States, the UK, and many other countries have not.

The words Burma and Myanmar derive from the same source and mean essentially the same thing; Burma is a spoken form and Myanmar is a literary form. Some advocates of the name Myanmar feel that it is less associated with the country’s colonial past than the form Burma, which was used by the country’s British rulers. (When the country was under British rule before 1948, it was called Burma in English and “Bama” or “Myanma” in Burmese.)

But use of the term Myanmar is also perceived as an indication of softness toward the present repressive regime that asserts the right to have instituted this change. The country’s pro-democracy movement and many others around the world do not regard the junta as a legitimate government, and many argue that recognizing its authority to change the country’s name implies that it has a degree of legitimacy as a government.

News agencies have responded in a variety of ways. While the New York Times calls the country Myanmar, for example, the Washington Post calls it Burma.

The Asian Art Museum follows the official United States government policy of referring to the country as Burma, on the grounds that the military junta has not been recognized as a legitimate governing body and consequently is not empowered to change the nation’s name.

LINKS

• The BBC on political issues surrounding the name dispute
• Slate magazine on news agencies’ responses

IMAGE SOURCE

• BBC News

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

Burma or Myanmar?

A peek behind-the-scenes at Emerald Cities:  Chief Curator Forrest McGill and Textile Conservator Denise Migdail examine a partially completed costume mount. With the help of museum preparation staff, Denise has designed and built this diminutive torso and a set of elaborately cut rigid supports (only one is shown here) to show off an embroidered and sequined nineteenth-century Burmese court costume.

I’m pretty excited that we’re showing this costume the way it would have been worn. However, displaying costumes on three-dimensional mannequins can be more stressful to aging fabrics than exhibiting them flat. As a result, readying this costume for its big debut involved more than just designing a mount. The garment itself needed to be stabilized. Loose threads were carefully stitched down, damaged sequins repaired, and the weakest sections of fabric reinforced.

Court costume, approx. 1850-1885. Burma, Mandalay region. Cotton embroidered with sequins and glass. Gift of Haskia Hasson, 2008.77.A-.J.

Typically, costumes such as this one were worn by Burmese courtiers for formal occasions. However, the very small size of this example also raises the possibility that it may have been for a child rather than an adult. Later on, many such garments had a second life as theatrical wear for actors playing royal roles. The look was not  just limited to live action theater — For Emerald Cities, we will display the assembled costume across from a Burmese puppet sporting a miniature version of a court costume just like this one.

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

Wearable Art

Even with the knowledge of the dazzling object list that is Emerald Cities (gold sculpture! gold furniture! gold gold!), putting together a collection of books for an exhibition is about more than sourcing pretty picture books.  And sometimes, while getting distracted, tangents offer the unexpected.

It was sometime back in pre-blog November 2008 that I  chanced upon the work of South East Asian artists Chaw Ei Thein and Richard Streitmatter-Tran.

Created for the Singapore Biennale, their imposing September Sweetness (2008) trumps the sugarcube edifices that I attempted as a wee architect.  With the aid of architects and structural engineers, the artists and their assistants boiled nearly six tons of sugar into stable building material and molded the compound into a Burmese-style structure.  Erected in the open air, the pagoda-like sculpture was unprotected from insects and elements, and as it inevitably crumbled, it called attention to the deterioration of the hopes of the Burmese who had just endured the ruling junta’s most recent retaliation.

Richard Streitmatter-Tran and Chaw Ei Thein ©Haupt&Binder

All very dramatic and sticky, and quite ambitious; what I admire is that the artists were willing to keep working toward the culmination of the project even though they didn’t know if the structure could withstand its own weight.  In some way the possibility that it might not work charmed me–hadn’t I heard stories of how the Burmese were, despite their government, among the friendliest of people?  And what does empire do to change a people?  How different might Thailand be if it had been colonized?

Although we’re a museum of art, and although Emerald Cities largely focuses on Doris Duke’s enormous gift to the museum, it’s important to consider what Southeast Asia looks like now, and where it’s headed.

Next on my list of readings, some of the many re-issued and updated works by Aung San Suu Kyi.  Any recommendations on where to start?

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

Finding Sweetness in Life

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

This image shows chief curator Forrest McGill and Wilsted & Taylor principal Christine Taylor proofing color for our upcoming catalogue of art objects from Burma and Thailand in conjunction with the Emerald Cities exhibition.

We typically go through three rounds of color proofs with the printer (in this case Regal Printing in Hong Kong). Most of our imagery is digital these days, which represents a savings of time and money. Traditional photography had to be scanned at the printer (or elsewhere) at significant expense and impact on the publication schedule. But with traditional photography — transparencies, slides, or prints — we would have the original to proof against. That, unfortunately, is not the case with digital.

With digital imagery we usually rely on matching prints produced by museum photographer Kaz Tsuruta, who has carefully calibrated his system. A portion of some of the match prints can be seen here in a binder by Forrest’s right elbow. In difficult cases we are sometimes able to compare the print to the original artwork. In the case of this book, for example, we looked at several objects that were being worked on in the conservation lab.

Proofing is done at our proofing station, which offers viewing consistency, spectrally neutral light, glare reduction, and evenness of illumination.

We check for overall color cast — the balance of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, which are the colors of the four-color printing process. We also check for retention of image detail (usually a function of the black separation), amount of contrast, and other elements. We may make global corrections to an entire image or call for spot corrections on only a portion of it.

The marked-up proofs are returned to the printer, who makes the requested changes and sends back another set for the next round of proofing. Once all the proofs have been okayed, the approved copies will be available on press for the person who is doing the press check to compare to the printed sheets. At that point press adjustments are still available. We believe a press check is an important component of any high-quality color printing job.

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

Proofing color

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. Tag and Christine Taylor listened to our concerns and came up with this design, which I think fits this subject better than any other book I have seen.

Above at right is the front cover, and at top is the full cover, including the front and back cover, spine, and flaps. The front cover features an object from Thailand and the back cover a detail of an embroidered and appliqued textile from Burma. The background of the cover (and jacket in the case of the hardcover edition) will be a kind of coppery gold metalic. There is an outline pattern on the flaps that is drawn from one of the objects in the exhibition (the pattern also runs discreetly through the spine). The hardcover jacket will include a French fold (it will be folded over at top and bottom). The decorative initial on the front flap picks up an element from the interior that is drawn from art of the region and period the book covers.

A challenge in this book was to come up with a design that is compatible with the decorative, sensual, spiritual, and ornate character of the art, without resorting to a proliferation of dingbats and flourishes—without creating too busy a page, full of gratuitous distractions. The title spread immediately establishes the decorative yet clean aesthetic of the book, which respects the art while keeping clarity of content foremost and serving the text rather than overshadowing it.

Full-page bleeds of details from the artworks convey their bling factor.

Here is a spread from one of the essays. At left is a pair of maps that I made for the book incorporating a color scheme that I thought would be consistent with the design. At right is one of several historical photos that appear in the essays.

Tag made a handsome chart that juxtaposes dates of the Burmese and the Siamese rulers so that it is easy to see how their reigns correspond.

The catalogue section is divided into three parts corresponding to the regions covered in the exhibition (central Thailand, northern Thailand, and Burma; more on this in a subsequent post). Each section is signaled by an opening spread that features a decorative pattern characteristic of the region. The section’s contents are outlined on this spread as an aid to the reader (running feet on the catalogue pages reinforce the structure).

Below is a spread from the catalogue section. Here you can see that in some views we silhouetted the objects while in others we retained the artful background blends of museum photographer Kaz Tsuruta.

Another example:

In good book design, such seemingly mundane elements as the copyright page, the bibliography, and the index get the same attention as the more dramatic pages. This is the opening of this book’s bibliography.

Finally, I believe that all well-made books should have a colophon containing details of their manufacture. This is the final page of the book.

I think this book will be as handsome as it will be useful. It is being printed by Regal Printing in Hong Kong.

If you want to see more Asian Art Museum titles, you can visit our store’s book page. Our books are available from our store and are distributed to the trade by Tuttle Publishing.

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

Emerald Cities: The Catalogue