Museum of Asia: Full of art from the past, not the past – Illinoisnewstoday.com

San Francisco

Approaching the Beaux-Arts building of the Asian Museum from Civic Center Plaza across the street, you might think that nothing has changed for almost six years, despite over $ 100 million in expansion and upgrade projects. Hmm. Completed in 2020, we are currently opening a new exhibition space. However, when I go to the entrance from a nearby shop behind the museum, the three murals declare that it is not. From the floor-to-ceiling window, you can see the line drawing of Chanel Millers Know My Name: AMemoir. Jennifer K. Woffords colorful pattern recognition fills the wall at the street level. Then, around the corner, the blue and pink Do nt Mess With Me woman from Jas Charanjiba looks down from the terrace and raises one hand with the thumb of a brass knuckle. For a museum with a collection of about 6000 years, welcoming us with contemporary Asian works, the Asian diaspora is equivalent to shouting, Asian art is a phenomenon of the past, not the past.

The museum has pointed out this point for a long time. The curator incorporated modern and contemporary paintings, pottery and other small and medium-sized works into some galleries of the collection, and exhibited a large installation in the lobby area on the ground floor. However, these often felt like isolated additions. Today, contemporary art has a larger and more integrated presence. The new 8,500-square-foot state-of-the-art gallery for special exhibitions allows one of the existing ground floor galleries to be dedicated to modern consignment and acquisition. In designing this extension, Los Angeles-based architect Kulapat Yantrasast added a rooftop art terrace that will open later this month or early September.

Two pieces of glittering glass beads have already been prepared: Dont Mess With Me, Ai Weiweis 2007 Fountain of Light, and Vladimir Tatlins spiral 1919-20 Monument to the Third International. It has been. These include Ala Ebtekahs Luminous Ground. This is a 55-foot-long handmade tile in which the artist printed an image from the Hubble Telescope using a blueprint, an early photographic process in Prussian blue tones. From the terrace, visitors can enter the collection galleries on the 2nd and 3rd floors, where they can enter the world as diverse, dynamic and global as the world in which the artist currently works.

Here, the layout has changed little, with a selection from the museums nearly 18,000 collections organized within a geographical section with both chronological and thematic groups. For example, a dark-walled room filled with Indonesian gold jewels or Chinese jade sculptures. Each section also selects one or two masterpieces with more eye-catching and informative presentations.

Museum of Asia: Full of art from the past, not the past

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Museum of Asia: Full of art from the past, not the past - Illinoisnewstoday.com