Asian Art Calendar of Events

Friday, June 13, 2025

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Mandala Lab
Place: The Rubin Museum of Art - New York, 150 West 17th St., USA
Date: Oct 01, 2021 to Oct 30, 2027
Detail: An Interactive Space for Social, Emotional, and Ethical Learning

The Mandala Lab, located on the Museum’s remodeled third floor, invites curiosity about our emotions. Consider how complex feelings show up in your everyday life and imagine how you might have the power to transform them.
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Knotted Clay: Raku Ceramics and Tea
Place: Smithsonian Institution - Washington, 1050 Independence Ave. SW, USA
Date: Dec 09, 2023 to Dec 09, 2026
Detail: Japan’s rich history of ceramic artistry developed in large part alongside the culture of drinking tea. The practice of preparing and serving matcha, powdered green tea, was called chanoyu (literally, “hot water for tea”) and gained popularity in the sixteenth century. Japanese tea practitioners initially used Chinese and Korean antique ceramics as tea bowls but began using newly made Japanese tea bowls, such as Raku ware, in the sixteenth century. Raku ware shares its name with the family that has made these ceramics in Kyoto since the sixteenth century. Unlike most tea bowls, Raku ceramics are built by hand—a process described as “knotting clay”—as opposed to using a wheel. Sixteenth-century potters are said to have collaborated closely with their tea-practitioner patrons to create distinctive vessels best-suited for tea drinking.

Over the next four centuries, a network of Japanese potters incorporated Raku techniques into their practice; these techniques were later adopted in the 1950s by the American studio pottery movement. Raku wares are now internationally recognized as a Japanese ceramic style and continue to inspire artistic creativity worldwide. Knotted Clay: Raku Ceramics and Tea explores these distinctive, hand-molded ceramics and their close relationship to Japanese tea culture. This exhibition features tea bowls, water containers, and other vessels in the museum’s permanent collection that demonstrate the glazes and forms unique to Raku ware.
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Striking Objects: Contemporary Japanese Metalwork
Place: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery | Gallery 22 - Washington, 1050 Independence Ave. SW, USA
Date: Mar 02, 2024 to Jan 02, 2026
Detail: Metalworking is at once powerful and delicate. Immense labor and heat are required to extract pure metals from ore to form alloys that are then made into flat metal sheets. The technique of hammering introduces powerful blows to create a shape, yet it can also soften and refine metal through the gentle warmth of rhythmic strikes. Traditional Japanese metalworking evolved to produce functional items, such as vessels and tools. Hammering was primarily applied to create water containers for making tea, gongs for both religious and secular use, bells, swords, and armor. Over time, the development of alloys, patination methods, and the infusion of foreign decorative techniques, such as chasing and inlay, expanded the visual and aesthetic potential of hammered metalwork.

Contemporary Japanese metalworking breathes life into traditional methods that have been passed down and practiced over generations. The artists featured in Striking Objects create masterpieces that combine tradition with creativity and innovation. The exhibition highlights works from the collection of Shirley Z. Johnson (1940–2021), distinguished lawyer, philanthropist, and former board member of the National Museum of Asian Art. Her passion for contemporary Japanese metalwork and her visionary gift have made the National Museum of Asian Art home to the largest collection of such works in the United States.
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Do Ho Suh: Public Figures
Place: National Museum of Asian Art | Freer Plaza - Washington, 1050 Independence Ave. SW, USA
Date: Apr 27, 2024 to Apr 29, 2029
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Contemporary Calligraphy and Clay
Place: The Cleveland Museum of Art - Cleveland, 11150 East Boulevard, Ohio, USA
Date: Jun 07, 2024 to Jun 15, 2025
Detail: Calligraphy and ceramics are two major art forms in Japanese culture. They have historically been appreciated together, often paired in spaces called tokonoma, or simply toko, a term that can be translated as “display alcove.” For centuries, people have hung calligraphy or paintings on the wall of a toko and placed ceramics, lacquers, or metalworks on the deck to create a particular mood for an occasion. Traditional reception rooms, living rooms, guest rooms, and teahouses, places where people hold small, significant gatherings, often feature toko. While toko are less common in newer architectural structures due to various factors, including limited space and a shift away from floor culture, today’s artists continue to create with them in mind but also increasingly envision new environments for their works. This installation considers the bond of calligraphy and clay through contemporary artworks set in the modern space of the museum gallery.
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A Passion for Jade: The Bishop Collection
Place: The Met Fifth Avenue - New York, 1000 Fifth Avenue, USA
Date: Jul 02, 2024 to Jan 04, 2026
Detail: More than a hundred remarkable objects from the Heber Bishop collection, including carvings of jade, the most esteemed stone in China, and many other hardstones, are on view in this focused presentation. The refined works represent the sophisticated art of Chinese gemstone carvers during the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) as well as the highly accomplished skills of Mogul Indian (1526–1857) craftsmen, which provided an exotic inspiration to their Chinese counterparts. Also on view are a set of Chinese stone-working tools and illustrations of jade workshops, which will introduce the traditional method of working jade.
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Against Time: The Noguchi Museum 40th Anniversary Reinstallation
Place: The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum - Long Island City, 9-01 33rd Road (at Vernon Boulevard), New York, USA
Date: Aug 28, 2024 to Sep 14, 2025
Detail: Coinciding with The Noguchi Museum’s 40th anniversary in 2025, works from the Museum’s original second floor installation will return to those galleries for the first time since 2009. Against Time is curated by Matthew Kirsch, Noguchi Museum Curator and Director of Research.
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Cai Guo-Qiang: A Material Odyssey
Place: USC Pacific Asia Museum - Pasadena, 46 North Los Robles Avenue, California, USA
Date: Sep 17, 2024 to Jun 15, 2025
Detail: For several decades, artist Cai Guo-Qiang has used gunpowder and pyrotechnics to create drawings, paintings, and explosion events. The exhibition Cai Guo-Qiang:A Material Odyssey will fill the first floor galleries at the USC Pacific Asia Museum. Based on years of research by the Getty Conservation Institute and the Getty Research Institute, A Material Odyssey will explore the nature and properties of gunpowder and chronicle its use by the artist. This explosive material, invented in China over 1,100 years ago, has come to define Cai’s work. Its unpredictable nature dictates his artistic process and determines the outcome. Through gunpowder, the artist invites uncontrollable forces to participate in the creation of his work. With an abundance of artworks and scientific displays, the exhibition will narrate the lifelong love story of Cai Guo-Qiang with gunpowder.

Programs accompanying A Material Odyssey will include videos illustrating the making of fireworks, the process of creating gunpowder paintings, interactive displays, and a variety of film screenings and conversations.
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Reinstallation of Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan
Place: The Cleveland Museum of Art - Cleveland, 11150 East Boulevard, Ohio, USA
Date: Oct 12, 2024 to Oct 12, 2025
Detail: The monumental sculpture of Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan returns to the permanent collection galleries for the first time since its new reconstruction was completed in 2021. To complement this major addition, 13 stone and bronze works from India, Cambodia, and Indonesia are also brought out for display.
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And more by more they dream their sleep: Mezzotints by Yōzō Hamaguchi
Place: Minneapolis Institute of Art - Minneapolis, 2400 Third Avenue South, Minnesota, USA
Date: Nov 27, 2024 to Jul 20, 2025
Detail: Yōzō Hamaguchi (1909–2000) was a master of color mezzotints, a technique that allowed printmakers to reproduce complex details of an artwork. Photography had rendered it obsolete by the 1900s, but Hamaguchi revived the technique after encountering it during a stay in Paris in the 1930s. There, he met American poet e.e. cummings, who gifted him a tool to achieve the signature tones in mezzotint. In the 1980s, Hamaguchi paid homage to the poet with the “e.e. cummings suite” of prints titled with lines from the poem “anyone lived in a pretty how town.”

This exhibition explores how Hamaguchi transformed the ordinary into the uncanny, featuring prints generously donated by Charles and Robyn Citrin and Bill and Roberta Stein.
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Perfectly Imperfect: Korean Buncheong Ceramics
Place: Denver Art Museum - Denver, 100 W 14th Ave. Pkwy., Colorado, USA
Date: Dec 03, 2024 to Nov 20, 2025
Detail: Perfectly Imperfect: Korean Buncheong Ceramics, co-organized with the National Museum of Korea (NMK), features more than 40 exquisite works of Korean Buncheong ceramics from the 15th century to today, renowned for their white slip and adorned with diverse surface decorative techniques. The exhibition also includes four 20th- and 21st-century paintings as well as 16 drawings by five painters.

Sophisticated, playful, and engaging, buncheong ceramics became a uniquely Korean art form in the late 14th to 16th centuries. Elements of the Buncheong style have remained relevant in modern and contemporary Korean art and have influenced other artistic expressions. Its refined and rustic aesthetic has been admired by generations of potters and artists in Korea and across the world.
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The Three Perfections: Japanese Poetry, Calligraphy, and Painting from the Mary and Cheney Cowles Collection
Place: The Met Fifth Avenue - New York, 1000 Fifth Avenue, USA
Date: Jan 01, 2025 to Aug 03, 2025
Detail: In East Asian cultures, the arts of poetry, calligraphy, and painting are traditionally referred to as the “Three Perfections.” This exhibition presents over 160 rare and precious works—all created in Japan over the course of nearly a millennium—that showcase the power and complexity of the three forms of art. Examples include folding screens with poems brushed on sumptuous decorated papers, dynamic calligraphy by Zen monks of medieval Kyoto, hanging scrolls with paintings and inscriptions alluding to Chinese and Japanese literary classics, ceramics used for tea gatherings, and much more.

The majority of the works are among the more than 250 examples of Japanese painting and calligraphy donated or promised to The Met by Mary and Cheney Cowles, whose collection is one of the finest and most comprehensive assemblages of Japanese art outside Japan.
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Ganesha: Lord of New Beginnings
Place: The Met Fifth Avenue - New York, 1000 Fifth Avenue, USA
Date: Jan 01, 2025 to Jan 04, 2026
Detail: Ganesha, the son of Shiva and Parvati, is a Brahmanical (Hindu) diety known to clear a path to the gods and remove obstacles in everyday life. He is loved by his devotees (bhakti) for his many traits, including his insatiable appetite for sweet cakes and his role as a dispenser of magic, surprise, and laughter. However, Ganesha is also the lord of ganas (nature deities) and can take on a fearsome aspect in this guise.

The seventh- to twenty-first-century works in this exhibition trace his depiction across the Indian subcontinent, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia. Featuring 24 works across sculptures, paintings, musical instruments, ritual implements, and photography, the exhibition emphasizes the vitality and exuberance of Ganesha as the bringer of new beginnings.
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Colorful Korea: The Lea R. Sneider Collection
Place: The Met Fifth Avenue - New York, 1000 Fifth Avenue, USA
Date: Jan 01, 2025 to Feb 16, 2026
Detail: Over the course of forty years, Lea R. Sneider (1925–2020) formed a significant collection of Korean art that challenged established norms. While appreciating literati art, she was particularly drawn to lively and colorful forms connected to everyday life, resulting in a diverse collection that illustrates Korea’s vibrant material culture. This exhibition features a substantial gift and loans from the Lea R. Sneider Collection, generously provided by her children. Through approximately 100 pieces from the fifth century to the present, including paintings, ceramics, furniture, textiles, and funerary and ritual objects, the exhibition highlights the pervasiveness of auspicious symbolism and the unpretentious dynamism in Korean art. Sneider has said that the works reflect the vitality and warmth of the people who engaged with them, a sentiment that her collection, with its emphasis on cultural and everyday relevance, underscores.
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Mountains of the Mind: A Chinese Landscape Journey
Place: Asian Art Museum - San Francisco, 200 Larkin Street, USA
Date: Jan 30, 2025 to Jul 28, 2025
Detail: Looking to get away from it all? This selection of idyllic landscapes by famed Chinese ink painters, past and present, offers a perfect opportunity to escape the hectic pace of city life in the digital age.

The selection on view offers a rare opportunity to enjoy a masterpiece by Ni Zan (1301-1374), a cultural icon in Chinese history, whose dry, spare brushwork evokes lyrical tranquility and a world cleansed of turmoil during the chaotic period of dynastic transition.

Following the ancient Chinese tradition of mountain worship, many of these landscapes use the contours of sacred mountains and the movements of waters and clouds to embody Daoist philosophy, beckoning the viewer to engage in a personal, cultural, and spiritual communion. As mountains are personified as venerable deities, rivers become their veins; mists are their breath; foliage is their hair; and rocks are their bones.
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Beautiful, Bountiful, Boisterous Birds
Place: Asian Art Museum - San Francisco, 200 Larkin Street, USA
Date: Feb 06, 2025 to Sep 15, 2025
Detail: Hawks, pheasants, ducks, quail, egrets, and other birds appear frequently in Japanese paintings. With roots in the Chinese “bird and flower” genre, some are traditionally associated with a particular season or sentiment; others were chosen by artists and patrons simply for their beauty.

The paintings currently on view in the Tateuchi Japanese Galleries use birds as both decorations and symbols, representing the seasons, strength, longevity, fidelity, or good fortune. They include decorative rimpa-style paintings; large, Kano-style screen paintings; and intimate hanging scrolls decorated in ink and faint colors.
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Shinoda Toko: Abstract Calligraphy
Place: Asian Art Museum - San Francisco, 200 Larkin Street, USA
Date: Feb 06, 2025 to Sep 15, 2025
Detail: A trailblazer in 20th-century Japanese calligraphy, Shinoda Toko (1913–2021) reshaped the art of ink abstraction with her distinctive and dynamic style.

Shinoda studied traditional calligraphy but soon rejected the practice of copying past masters, likening it to “creating a fake.” A calligrapher at heart, Shinoda preferred lithography over woodblock printing, as it allowed her to directly apply her brushwork to the plate, capturing the nuances of each stroke.

As she transitioned from painting legible Chinese characters toward avant-garde abstraction, Shinoda initially faced resistance in Japan and moved to New York in 1956. “I wanted to see how my works would be received in a foreign country,” she later recalled, “where letters are not read as letters.” Throughout her 107-year lifetime, the artist consistently sought her own vision of beauty, free from the confines of tradition.
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Gateway to Himalayan Art
Place: Utah Museum of Fine Arts - Salt Lake City, University of Utah, Utah, USA
Date: Feb 15, 2025 to Jul 27, 2025
Detail: Gateway to Himalayan Art is a flexible exhibition designed to meet the needs of diverse educational institutions, art museums, and their audiences. It serves as an entry point to the integrated components of Project Himalayan Art (a three-part initiative comprising a traveling exhibition, publication, and digital platform), highlighting a thematic approach for teaching and engagement with objects.

The exhibition’s three areas of focus are Symbols and Meanings, Materials and Technologies, and Living Practices. Traditional scroll paintings (thangkas), sculptures in various media, and ritual items comprise the diverse range of objects on view. Among the featured installations are in-depth displays that explain the process of Nepalese lost-wax metal casting and the stages of Tibetan thangka painting. Multimedia features include videos of art making and religious and cultural practices, audio recordings of voices from Himalayan communities that highlight the living traditions, and much more on the integrated digital platform that offers rich contextual material to dive deeper.
The exhibition opens with a large map that highlights regions of the diverse Himalayan cultural sphere, including parts of present-day India, China, Nepal, Bhutan, and Mongolia. Gateway invites you to explore exemplary objects from the Museum’s collection, organized and presented in thematic sections: Figures and Symbols, Materials and Techniques, and Purpose and Function.

In addition to sculptures and paintings, objects such as a stupa, prayer wheel, and ritual implements demonstrate how patrons sought the accumulation of merit and hoped for wealth, long life, and spiritual gains, all to be fulfilled through the ritual use of these objects and commissioning works of art.

Among the featured installations are a display that explains the process of Nepalese lost-wax metal casting and a presentation of the stages of Tibetan hanging scroll painting (thangka). You will also encounter life-size reproductions of murals from Tibet’s Lukhang Temple, photographed by Thomas Laird and Clint Clemens.
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Yang Fudong: Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest
Place: Asia Society - New York, 725 Park Avenue, USA
Date: Feb 18, 2025 to Aug 10, 2025
Detail: Yang Fudong (born 1971 in Beijing, China; lives and works in Shanghai). Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, Part I, 2003. Single-channel video with sound; 35mm black-and-white film transferred to DVD. Duration: 29 minutes, 22 seconds. Asia Society, New York: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Harold and Ruth Newman, 2011.24

Asia Society Museum is showing Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest, in its entirety as a prelude to the upcoming exhibition, (Re)Generations: Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim, and Howardena Pindell amid the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller Collection, opening in March. The work follows seven young men and women on journeys in search of their identities and ideal lives, reflecting the many urban, ideological, and economic transformations across China today.
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Imperial Treasures: Chinese Ceramics of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties from the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection
Place: Asia Society - New York, 725 Park Avenue, USA
Date: Feb 18, 2025 to Aug 10, 2025
Detail: Known for exquisite porcelain production and expansive trade, the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) represents a period of Chinese imperial rule between the fall of the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) and the rise of the Manchu Qing dynasty (1644–1911). The approximately 20 works selected for this exhibition demonstrate how early Ming ceramics inherited the rich and culturally diverse legacy of the Mongol rulers by adopting foreign influences through vibrant trade with the Islamic and Central Asian worlds and combining them with indigenous Chinese traditions.
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(Re)Generations: Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim, and Howardena Pindell amid the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection
Place: Asia Society - New York, 725 Park Avenue, USA
Date: Mar 04, 2025 to Aug 10, 2025
Detail: This exhibition reintroduces key works in Asia Society Museum's Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection of pre-modern Asian art through the lenses of three leading contemporary artists: Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim, and Howardena Pindell. Each artist has selected a number of works in the collection within which to situate their own new and existing works, approaching historic objects in the collection through their practices and from multiple cultures, heritages, and positions. Creating dialogues across multiple histories and places, these artists offer a range of new insights and entry points into the collection.
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Hiraki Sawa: Journeys in Place
Place: Asia Society - New York, 725 Park Avenue, USA
Date: Mar 04, 2025 to Aug 10, 2025
Detail: Japanese-born and London-based Hiraki Sawa creates video works that explore psychological landscapes, unexpected worlds, and the playful interweaving of domestic and imaginary spaces. His works traverse specific, often personal, landscapes to consider memory, migration, and displacement. Asia Society invited Sawa to frame his video trail (2005), held in the museum’s collection, with a selection of works from the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection, echoing the approach of the exhibition (Re)Generations in the museum’s 2nd- and 3rd-floor galleries. His selection of a small-scale pair of lion-dogs (flanking the video monitor) and bixies (mythical creatures) relate to the miniaturized camel who is the main protagonist of trail. Asia Society’s beloved elephant-headed sandstone Ganesha completes the display, bringing joy, good luck, and wealth to the many who venerate the popular deity.
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Indian Painting of the 1500s: Continuities and Transformations
Place: The Cleveland Museum of Art - Cleveland, 11150 East Boulevard, Ohio, USA
Date: Mar 07, 2025 to Sep 07, 2025
Detail: When the 1500s began, the dominant style of Indian painting was flat and abstract with a limited, mainly primary color palette. By the 1520s, a new style emerged with greater narrative complexities and dramatic energy that was to be foundational for later developments. Concurrently, some artists began working in the pastel palette and with delicate motifs reinterpreted from Persian art.

Then, around 1560, with the exuberant patronage of the third Mughal emperor Akbar (born 1542, reigned 1556–1605), artists from different parts of the empire and trained in a variety of Indian styles came together in a new imperial painting workshop. The workshop was led by Persian masters brought from the imperial court in Iran. The formation of Mughal painting shaped by Akbar’s taste for drama and realism had a lasting impact on the cultural life of India. With its naturalism and vibrant compositions, the revolutionary new style was distinct from its predecessors, both Indian and Persian. The paintings in this gallery trace the dramatic changes that occurred during the 1500s alongside compositions that artists chose to retain and reinvent. Central to this story is a manuscript of the Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot), an illustrated collection of fables made for Akbar around 1560–65 now in the Cleveland Museum of Art.
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Landscapes by Arnold Chang (Zhang Hong): A Retrospective and Recent Acquisitions
Place: The Cleveland Museum of Art - Cleveland, 11150 East Boulevard, Ohio, USA
Date: Mar 08, 2025 to Nov 09, 2025
Detail: This installation reviews the artistic career of Arnold Chang 张洪 (Zhang Hong, American, born 1954) and celebrates the museum’s recent acquisition by Chang, Secluded Valley in the Cold Mountains, a pivotal work that marks his breakthrough as an international contemporary ink artist. Showcasing 18 works by the artist, plus the CMA’s Number 5, 1950 (1950) by Jackson Pollock, the exhibition explores Chang’s formative years which eventually culminate in free and exploratory ways that include the use of photography and color.
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Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei
Place: Seattle Art Museum - Seattle, 1300 First Avenue, USA
Date: Mar 12, 2025 to Sep 07, 2025
Detail: “Everything is art. Everything is politics.” Globally renowned artist Ai Weiwei (Chinese, b. 1957) is celebrated as a disruptor of artistic canons and a champion of free expression. In his work—ranging across performance, photography, sculpture, video, and installation—he deploys humor and provocation, calling upon his viewers to examine history, society, and culture. Organized by SAM, Ai, Rebel: The Art and Activism of Ai Weiwei highlights the artistic strategies of his 40-year career for questioning forms of power. It marks the artist’s first US retrospective in over a decade and his largest-ever US exhibition.

Ai, Rebel explores over 130 works created over four decades, from the 1980s to the 2020s, offering visitors a rare opportunity to engage with the conceptual artist’s wide-ranging body of work. Iconic works from his career are on view, including Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), Study of Perspective (1995–2011), Sunflower Seeds (2010), Neolithic Vase with Coca Cola Logo (Gold) (2015), and Illumination (2019). The exhibition also features several works making their international debut.

For the first time in its 90-year history, SAM is presenting the work of one artist at all three of its locations at the same time. In addition to the major retrospective at the downtown location, the Seattle Asian Art Museum presents Ai Weiwei: Water Lilies (March 19, 2025–March 15, 2026), a reinterpretation in LEGOs of one of Claude Monet’s famed water lilies paintings. The Olympic Sculpture Park presents Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze) (May 17, 2025–May 17, 2027), a circle of 12 monumental bronze sculptures. This offers a unique opportunity to engage deeply with Ai Weiwei’s work in different contexts across the city.
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2024 New Generation Bamboo Art Prize Winners
Place: Asian Art Museum - San Francisco, 200 Larkin Street, USA
Date: Mar 13, 2025 to Dec 05, 2025
Detail: Stunning bamboo artworks by the recipients of the 2024 New Generation Bamboo Art Prizes are currently on view in the Henri and Tomoye Takahashi Gallery, including the winner of this year’s Coffland Grand Prize, Frill: Surging Waves III by artist Nakatomi Hajime (Japanese, b. 1974).

The Asian Art Museum is home to one of the largest collections of Japanese bamboo art in the world, thanks to generous donations from collector Lloyd Cotsen (1929–2017), who encouraged contemporary bamboo artists through his sponsorship of the Cotsen Bamboo Prize. Today, this legacy lives on through The Next Generation Bamboo Art Prizes. Organized by Robert Coffland and Margo Thoma (and judged by a panel including the Asian Art Museum’s Associate Curator of Japanese Art Yuki Morishima), The Next Generation Bamboo Art Prizes celebrate and support the future of Japanese bamboo art. 
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Delighting Krishna: Paintings of the Child-God
Place: Arthur M. Sackler Gallery | Gallery 24, Smithsonian Institution - Washington, 1050 Independence Ave. SW, USA
Date: Mar 15, 2025 to Aug 24, 2025
Detail: Imagine a god who appears to you as a mischievous child—you dance together in meadows, play with him, and gift him fruits and flowers. This may give you an idea of how the Hindu Pushtimarg community engages with the divine. They seek to delight and care for the child-god Krishna, and in return, they receive joy and spiritual insight. Delighting Krishna delves into the emotions and philosophy of the Pushtimarg tradition and the ingenuity of its artists.

Pushtimarg religious spaces feature monumental paintings of Krishna on cotton cloth known as pichwais. For the first time since the 1970s, these fourteen pichwais from the National Museum of Asian Art’s collections are on view for the public. These paintings are literally larger than life, averaging about eight by eight feet in size. Pichwais are made to serve as backdrops for three-dimensional displays, typically paired with icons of Krishna, music, and scents. This collection of pichwais dates from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and most were painted in Nathdwara, Rajasthan, the global epicenter of the Pushtimarg community.

Encounter these intriguing paintings from multiple angles through insights from Hindu community members, curators, conservators, and a conservation scientist. Alongside the pichwais, court paintings illuminate Krishna’s playful charm, and mixed-media works show how the Pushtimarg tradition engages the senses. Awash with color and brimming with joy, these artworks themselves invite delight.
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Ai Weiwei: Water Lilies
Place: Seattle Asian Art Museum - Seattle, 1400 East Prospect Street, USA
Date: Mar 19, 2025 to Mar 15, 2026
Detail: Nearly 50 feet in length and made from 650,000 LEGO blocks, Ai Weiwei’s Water Lilies (2022) is the artist’s largest and most ambitious LEGO work to date. This reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s iconic triptych from the Museum of Modern Art in New York offers an equally immersive experience, merging the lush beauty of Monet’s water lilies with Ai’s personal history.

Visitors can experience this work—displayed in one long panel on a single wall—up close in an intimate gallery at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. This is the first time this work has been shown in the US; it debuted in 2023 at the Berlin art gallery neugerriemschneider.

The piece has a connection with the Seattle Art Museum’s history. An actual Monet Water Lilies work was loaned to the museum in 1956 by Walter P. Chrysler Jr., who purchased it from the Monet estate and toured it around the United States. The painting was displayed in the Fuller Garden Court of the Seattle Asian Art Museum, the original home of the Seattle Art Museum
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Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War
Place: Asian Art Museum - San Francisco, 200 Larkin Street, USA
Date: Apr 03, 2025 to Jul 07, 2025
Detail: The personal becomes universal in recent work by pioneering Taiwanese artist Yuan Goang-Ming (b. Taipei, 1965), whose starkly poetic videos and installations examine the fragmented and surreal nature of contemporary life.

Yuan’s work trains an unblinking, glacially cool digital gaze on poignant scenes of global and domestic unease. From the eerie stillness of empty streets during Taiwan’s annual air raid drills to the chaotic aftermath of an explosion detonated in his own living room, the artist captures moments that resonate with current living conditions worldwide.

Featuring numerous works that debuted in Yuan’s critically acclaimed exhibition representing Taiwan at the 60th Venice Biennale, this large-scale exhibition in the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion is the artist’s first North American solo show. The exhibition is curated by Abby Chen, curator of contemporary art at the Asian Art Museum and curator of Yuan’s celebrated Biennale presentation.
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Suchitra Mattai: she walked in reverse and found their songs
Place: Seattle Asian Art Museum - Seattle, 1400 East Prospect Street, USA
Date: Apr 09, 2025 to Jul 20, 2025
Detail: Suchitra Mattai was born in Georgetown, Guyana, and immigrated to Canada as a young child. The history of her ancestors—brought from India to work as indentured laborers in Guyana—deeply influences her practice. Using techniques passed down through generations, she weaves materials marked by the past into a collective story of migration and gendered labor. In this exhibition, Mattai turns inward, examining the power of memory in the creation of her own stories: sometimes factual, sometimes fantastical, with divergent pieces collapsing and combining into something new.

At the center of the exhibition, Mattai reimagines her grandparents’ home in Guyana, the core of her migration story. Elsewhere, the imagined interior of that home spills into the gallery, where sculptures and characters help guide us along a memory journey. The title of the exhibition, she walked in reverse and found their songs, points to the ways in which peering back can help us find our place in the world. But the exhibition also illustrates slippages between past and present, reminding us that memory is subjective and that histories can—and should—be rewritten. Mattai invites us to create space for ourselves where there was none before, engage legacies of the past while rupturing with tradition, and mobilize memory toward new futures.
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The Art of Peace: Jizai Okimono from a Private Collection
Place: Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens - Delray Beach, 4000 Morikami Park Road, Florida, USA
Date: Apr 29, 2025 to Sep 28, 2025
Detail: A captivating new exhibition showcasing jizai okimono — intricately crafted movable sculptures. The 19 sculptures in this exhibition are quite unusual. They represent the shift from warrior-rule in the Edo period (1603-1868) to a constitutional monarchy in the Meiji period (1868-1912). These works of art were traditionally made by armorers. However, as the ruling shoguns were able to maintain peace for over 300 years, there were fewer and fewer requests for new armor. In order to maintain their skill and precision, the metalsmiths of the mid-Edo period turned to more artistic endeavors – creating jizai okimono. Ji-zai (自在), means articulated or moveable; and oki-mono (置物) are decorative objects. The works are realistic representations of animals and mythical beasts with joints that allow full range of motion. The art objects quickly became collectors’ items outside of Japan.
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Japanese War Brides: Across a Wide Divide
Place: Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens - Delray Beach, 4000 Morikami Park Road, Florida, USA
Date: May 03, 2025 to Aug 17, 2025
Detail: Morikami Museum is pleased to present, Japanese War Brides: Across a Wide Divide, which explores the lives of more than 45,000 Japanese women who immigrated to the United States in the aftermath of World War II. This exhibit illuminates previously unknown American immigration stories and offers space to rethink how we hate, why we love, and what it means to be American. Produced by The War Bride Experience, Inc., the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
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Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia
Place: Los Angeles County Museum of Art - Los Angeles, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., USA
Date: May 11, 2025 to Jul 12, 2025
Detail: Realms of the Dharma: Buddhist Art Across Asia presents an international survey of Buddhism and Buddhist art, beginning with the religion’s origins in India and following its spread through mainland and island Southeast Asia (Myanmar [Burma], Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Indonesia), the Himalayas (Kashmir, Nepal, and Tibet), and East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan). Incorporating 180 masterpieces of pan-Asian Buddhist art, the exhibition introduces key concepts of Buddhist thought and practice viewed through the prism of rare and extraordinarily beautiful Buddhist sculptures, paintings, and ritual objects.

Drawn from LACMA’s permanent collection, with several significant loans from private collections, the exhibition explores the life of the Buddha, the role of the bodhisattva or Buddhist savior, Buddhist cosmology, and such key concepts as dharma, karma, nirvana, mantra, mudra, and mandala. The show will focus on art associated with such key phases of Buddhism as Theravada (early monastic Buddhism), Mahayana (the “Great Vehicle”), Vajrayana (the “Diamond Vehicle”—tantric or esoteric Buddhism), and Chan (Zen).
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World of the Terracotta Warriors: New Archaeological Discoveries in Shaanxi in the 21st Century
Place: Bowers Museum - Santa Ana, 2002 North Main Street, California, USA
Date: May 24, 2025 to Oct 19, 2025
Detail: From the museum that brought you the U.S. premiere of China's Terracotta Warriors in 2008, Bowers proudly presents new groundbreaking discoveries with World of the Terracotta Warriors: New Archaeological Discoveries in Shaanxi in the 21st Century! Explore China’s captivating early history through recent archaeological finds from Shaanxi Province, learning why it is hailed as a cradle of ancient Chinese civilization. Traverse millennia, from Shimao around 2300 BCE—among the earliest walled cities in China—to pivotal sites of the Shang and Zhou eras, culminating in the iconic terracotta warriors commissioned by the Qin emperor and completed after his death in 210 BCE.
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Refocusing Photography: China at the Millennium
Place: The Cleveland Museum of Art - Cleveland, 11150 East Boulevard, Ohio, USA
Date: Jun 08, 2025 to Nov 16, 2025
Detail: From 1949 to 1978, photography in the People’s Republic of China was reserved for governmental propaganda: its function was to present an idealized image of life under Chairman Mao and communist rule. In 1978, as China opened to global trade and Western societies, photography as documentation, art, and personal expression experienced a sudden awakening. Personal photographic societies formed, art schools began teaching photography, and information on Western contemporary art became available.

In the late 1990s, a new generation of Chinese artists, many initially trained as painters, revolted against traditional academic definitions of photography. Building on the work done in the previous decades by Western artists, they dissolved the boundaries between photography, performance art, conceptual art, and installation. In so doing, they brought photography into the foreground in Chinese contemporary art. This exhibition presents works from the museum’s collection by eight key artists from that generation.

Born between 1962 and 1969, these artists grew up during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), when conformity was required and past intellectual and artistic products—whether artistic, family history, or documentary—were banned and destroyed. They also experienced the cultural vacuum that followed this erasure. As adults, these artists lived in a radically different China—newly prosperous, individualistic, and consumerist. They helped develop a new visual idiom, producing artworks that addressed their country’s recent history, its swift societal transformation, and their own resultant shift in identity as Chinese.
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New Japanese Clay
Place: Asian Art Museum - San Francisco, 200 Larkin Street, USA
Date: Aug 15, 2025 to Feb 02, 2026
Detail: Playful colors, otherworldly surfaces, adventurous and gravity-defying shapes — the world of contemporary Japanese ceramics is brimming with dynamic approaches to the medium of clay. From rugged works that mimic chunks of earth or stone to delicate forms imitating folds of paper or billowing textiles, the unconventional techniques in New Japanese Clay will expand your idea of what is possible in this time-honored art form.

The exhibition also introduces visitors to the makers behind the works on view. “This new generation of potters from Japan are building on the legacy of the mingei (folk art) movement while charting their own boldly experimental courses,” says Chief Curator and exhibition curator Dr. Robert Mintz, who notes that many of the featured artists also maintain social media accounts offering behind-the-scenes looks at their studio process.

“The artists in New Japanese Clay are challenging the conventions of functional ceramics and pivoting toward a purely sculptural experience,” Dr. Mintz notes. “Their creations are meant to intrigue and delight; the vessel form is just a point of departure for spectacular experimentation. Through a wide range of innovative materials and methods, these artists are reimagining ceramics for the 21st century.”
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Asia

USA & Canada | Europe & Africa

Batik Nyonyas: Three Generations of Art and Entrepreneurship
Place: Peranakan Museum - Singapore, 39 Armenian St, Singapore 179941, Singapore
Date: Oct 11, 2024 to Aug 31, 2025
Detail: 11 October 2024 to 31 August 2025
Daily, 10am–7pm | Fridays, 10am–9pm
Peranakan Museum
$6 for Singaporeans and Permanent Residents; $18 for Foreigners

Family, art, and entrepreneurship converge in the story of three visionary Peranakan women from Indonesia – Nyonya Oeij Soen King, her daughter-in-law Nyonya Oeij Kok Sing, and her granddaughter Jane Hendromartono. From the 1890s to 1980s, they produced impressive batiks in the renowned batik centre of Pekalongan on Java’s north coast.

Featuring about 200 batik textiles and accompanying objects, Batik Nyonyas: Three Generations of Art and Entrepreneurship examines the lives and careers of these Peranakan women through their works. With batik as a portrait of society, the exhibition reveals the influence of the Oeij family women as they became batik masters in their own right, as they ingeniously responded to the rapid political, cultural and economic changes of their time to run a business that produced great art. Visitors are invited to draw links to the development and evolution of Indonesian batik through a Peranakan perspective, and to participate in hands-on workshops, performances and tours. The exhibition will also feature a contemporary art commission by Aiko Tezuka, an artist specialised in producing art based on the unravelling of woven fabric.

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City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s
Place: National Gallery Singapore - Singapore, 30 Mohamed Sultan Road, Singapore
Date: Apr 02, 2025 to Aug 17, 2025
Detail: A groundbreaking exhibition coming in April, exploring the rich art history of Paris through the eyes of Asian artists. City of Others: Asian Artists in Paris, 1920s-1940s is the first major comparative exhibition on Asian artists in Paris during the dynamic interwar period between the 1920s and 1940s. Discover how artists like Foujita Tsuguharu, Georgette Chen, Lê Phô and Liu Kang contributed to the global art narrative alongside luminaries such as Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali and Ernest Hemingway while grappling with their own cultural identities and perceptions of being an ‘other’. Through their stories, the exhibition prompts reflection on themes of identity, belonging, cultural exchange, creativity, and resilience – offering insights that continue to resonate with today’s contemporary conversations.
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Exhibition Private

USA & Canada

Europe & Africa | Asia

Giving Form to Color: New Work by Sawada Hayato
Place: Joan B. Mirviss, Ltd. - New York, 39 East 78th Street, 4th fl, USA
Date: May 08, 2025 to Jun 30, 2025
Detail: The long-anticipated international solo debut for artist Sawada Hayato (b. 1978), Giving Form to Color features exciting new works created exclusively for this exhibition. Hailing from Kasama, Ibaraki, just north of Tokyo, Sawada creates ceramic vessels in the tradition of the Kantō region’s most renowned past ceramic masters, Kamoda Shōji and Wada Morihiro. Although Sawada never met either Kamoda or Wada, he shares these seminal figures’ unique approach to the unity of pattern, form, and material, leading some art critics to describe the three artists as forming an exciting new Kantō ceramic lineage.
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