A CITY OF silk and splendour, glory and decline – Murshidabad is the forgotten capital of Bengal. Eager to retell the city’s story, Indian book publishers, Marg, have recently published a 136-page, highly illustrated book that explores this great but… Continue reading
IN THE HEART of the Northern Village of Seoul in Bukchon, South Korea resides a fascinating private museum displaying all that glitters within an innovative design space. This is the World Jewellery Museum, the first museum in Asia devoted to… Continue reading
LAST YEAR, the Cultural Heritage Administration, based in Singapore, approached the Honolulu Museum of Art in Honolulu about applying for a grant to conserve the Korean artworks in its collection. Some of the Korean paintings in the museum’s collection have… Continue reading
NANJING IS THE hugely prosperous capital of Jiangsu Province. Surrounded by heavily wooded hills with luxurious vegetation, it still has many of its original high Ming walls, now crumbling with all the pleasure of ruins. The Yangtze, wide, swollen and… Continue reading
RATHER-LESS VISTED by foreign tourists than other major sites, Kenninji Temple is well-known for being the oldest Zen temple in Kyoto, even though it has been much re-built from time to time throughout its history. The temple was founded in… Continue reading
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