YANG ZHICHAO IS arguably China’s most extreme performance artist, who has used his body as a medium to comment obliquely on social issues and to examine the place of the individual within Chinese society. He has cut, pierced, burned, and… Continue reading
THIS EXHIBITION OF cross-cultural esoteric Buddhist art, comprising predominantly Himalayan works of art, including Tibetan thangka, from the San Francisco Asian Art Museum’s collections, illustrates a unique concept whereby for the first time in a museum’s history, the curator Jeffrey… Continue reading
THROUGHOUT HISTORY, art has been destroyed and culture assaulted. Sometimes it was by accident. Sometimes it was intentional for the purpose of total destruction of buildings and culture of an enemy. Sometimes it was for the purpose of plunder and… Continue reading
A HEAVY THUNDERSTORM in 1981 led to the dramatic collapse of the Famen Temple, a 13-storey pagoda in Shaanxi province, China, built in 1609. However, it was not until 1987 when further exploratory excavation began did the pagoda reveal its… Continue reading
THE FLORENCE AND Herbert Irving Asian Wing at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, is home to one of the most extensive and comprehensive collections of Asian art in the West: It boasts more than 35,000 objects, from paintings and prints… Continue reading
THIS WELL-RECEIVED exhibition on contemporary Chinese ink art presents works 70 by 35 artists born in China. It explores the idea of China’s age-old habit of seeking cultural renewal through the reinterpretation of past models. How the past can be… Continue reading
THEY USED TO call pre-modern Korea ‘the Hermit Kingdom’. The name no longer applies, yet the country’s cultural and artistic traditions remain relatively unknown in the West. Hyunsoo Woo, The Maxine and Howard Lewis Associate Curator at Philadelphia Museum of… Continue reading
LOOKING AROUND the rich interiors of almost any of the palaces or grand houses of Europe, one invariably spots Chinese or Japanese porcelain objects that had originally been imported during the 17th and 18th centuries. Not that many it seems… Continue reading
Asian Art Newspaper looks at early Islamic silk textiles in this exhibition organised by the Cleveland Museum of Art. ‘NOW COME with me and cast your eye over the immense crowd of turbaned heads, wrapped in countless folds of the whitest… Continue reading
Canopies for the Goddess, mata no chandarvo, is the name created for this large-scale exhibition of illustrated Gujarat textiles from, India. These large-format textiles mark sacred places used specifically for the veneration of goddesses. These printed or painted cloths tell the… Continue reading