Poll: Your favorite Shanghai era

[polldaddy poll=2608818]

The museum’s Shanghai exhibition is organized into four main time periods. One of the themes that runs through the show concerns the attitudes to women expressed in Shanghai art. These four images of women will give a taste — but only a taste, since in each period the range of artistic activity is of course much wider than these images suggest — of the various phases in Shanghai’s artistic development. Asking you to name a favorite is a little silly, like asking what’s your favorite color, as if you would want everything in the world to be green or whatever; still, suppose you only had a few minutes to catch the show — which section would you head for?

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Shanghai sneak peek – Qipao

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.

Shanghai remodeling

With Shanghai right around the corner, museum preparation staff have been busy reconfiguring the museum in ways we haven’t quite seen before.

Objects selected  for Shanghai include not only the 2-D paintings and works on paper that visitors might expect, but a wide variety of furniture, textile arts, video works, and contemporary installations by leading Shanghai artists. This variety of object types can be a challenge for our designer. In particular, the museum’s existing gallery spaces were not originally designed to fit contemporary installation art or to display video art.

As a result, various spaces around the museum have been receiving substantial Shanghai makeovers.

Windows to north court are covered with new walls to create additional display space.

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Shanghai audiotour with Joan Chen

Asian Art Museum director Jay Xu (center) with his wife Jennifer (left) actress Joan Chen (right). Photo by Catherine Bigelow

It’s one of those pinch-me-is-this-for-real? moments: today I was sending an email to Joan Chen, yes THAT Joan Chen–the super talented and gorgeous film star and director. I think the first movie I saw her in was The Last Emperor and the most recent was Lust, Caution, much of which was set in Shanghai. Those two mega movies bookend an incredibly interesting career that still has lots of surprises in store. Checking out her filmography on Wikipedia I was delighted to note she starred in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street, set in the lovely (no sarcasm intended) city of Baltimore (“Ball-more” for many natives), near where I grew up. Homicide used to be my favorite TV show so now I will be hunting this episode down. Did you know she also played Josie Packard in David Lynch’s TV series Twin Peaks?

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A little holiday travel cheer

The holidays are upon us and that means one thing — many hours spent braving the timeless monotony of airport terminals. But for those of you flying through San Francisco International Airport this season, we’ve got a special treat for your weary eyes. You see, there is a little project that we’ve been working on behind-the-scenes.

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.
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Nanjing Road: Then and Now

Nanjing Road in Shanghai has been compared to Fifth Avenue in New York.  In the 1920s and 1930s, it was the mercantile and commercial hub of the city.   As I was strolling along through the now pedestrian-only street, I got a nice surprise:  I realized that I was standing at the exact same intersection that has been pictured in this 1930s poster that will be in the exhibition Shanghai:

Nanjing Road – From Series of Views of Shanghai, after 1932

After having looked at this poster for the past six months, the image has been burned into my memory.  So, with this image in mind, I sought to take pictures of the same frame.

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“Shanghai Baby” and the World Expo 2010

"Shanghai Baby" (Hai Bao 海宝), mascot of the World Expo 2010

During my recent trip to Shanghai, I became somewhat obsessed with this figure of Hai Bao, the official mascot of the World Expo 2010 to be held in Shanghai in May 2010.  Hai Bao’s name can be translated as “Shanghai Baby,” and he appears all over the city (both in Puxi and Pudong) on billboards, shop posters, and bus advertisments, just to name a few.

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Shanghai: Art of the City
the catalogue cover

When I showed pages from our upcoming Shanghai catalogue previously I was not ready to show a cover. It looks now like this cover will probably be it. The image is a detail from a poster from the deco period. The image below shows the front cover together with the spine and back  cover.

What do you think? What qualities does this convey to you?

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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In with the new

June 31 is the end of the museum’s official business year, so over the past few weeks staff throughout the museum have been busy going over the happenings and accomplishments of the last twelve months. For registration, part of this has included checking that the year’s new acquisitions are in order.

Every year is a little different when it comes to acquisitions. Factors such as current art trends, the economic environment, and serendipity all interact with curatorial priorities and exhibition plans. But one thing I’ve noticed this year is an increase in the number of gifts of work by living artists. With this in mind, I thought I’d share a few of my favorite such gifts from the past year.

The White Wild Kerria Rose, 2004 from the series "Ceramic Representations From Natural History", By Sugiura Yasuyoshi (Japanese, born 1949), Stoneware with white, dark brown, and gold glazes; cloth texturing and carving, Gift of Paul and Kathleen Bissinger, F2009.15

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