Asian Art Calendar of Events

Sunday, July 25, 2021

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The Enchantment of the Everyday: East Asian Decorative Arts from the Permanent Collection
Place: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College - Oberlin, 87 North Main Street, USA
Date: Jul 09, 2020 to Sep 03, 2021
Detail: Glimpse into a different world, where the everyday object became something magical in the hands of artisans working in ivory, jade, cloisonné, and other luxurious materials.

Table settings, combs and hairpins, belt toggles, boxes for documents—all are potentially unremarkable, utilitarian, and overlooked artifacts of daily life. This exhibition provides a glimpse into a different world, where the everyday object—enhanced by the creativity and skills of East Asian master artisans—became something magical.

Highlighted here are spectacular examples of East Asian decorative arts from the permanent collection, largely dating to the 19th century, that complement the ceramics, jades, and ivory netsuke on view in other museum galleries. Included are both very recent additions to the collection and works that came to Oberlin College as part of the bequest of Charles Olney in 1904, as well as many acquisitions from the intervening years—all testaments to the Allen’s abiding interest in Asian decorative arts.

The Enchantment of the Everyday presents objects made with luxurious materials: gold lacquerware, delicately carved ivory, colorful enamelware, glass, metalwork, and complex tapestries and embroideries. The works showcase the inspiration, ingenuity, and technical accomplishments of generations of artists specializing in these diverse mediums.

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20 Dances: Japanese Calligraphy Then and Now
Place: Minneapolis Institute of Art - Minneapolis, 2400 Third Avenue South, USA
Date: Aug 01, 2020 to Jan 02, 2022
Detail: In East Asia, calligraphy has been hailed as the highest of all art forms for more than 15 centuries. It’s not hard to understand why: With more than 80,000 Chinese characters and infinite graphic variations, the expressive potential is unlimited. The results, as seen in this exhibition, speak for themselves. Each work is a unique expression of the artist’s personality, offering a glimpse into the culture that held calligraphy in such high esteem.

The Japanese writing system was adopted from Chinese characters; given the Japanese reverence for Chinese artistic traditions, these works explore the full range of scripts possible with these characters: seal script (tensho), running script (gyosho), cursive script (sosho), clerical script (reisho), and standard script (kaisho). Calligraphy’s emphasis on movement and timing suggests dancing, and each script has its own rhythm, from the formal strictness of seal script to the wild dance of cursive writing.

This exhibition will be presented in two rotations: Rotation 1: August 1, 2020 – June 6, 2021. Rotation 2: June 19, 2021 – January 2, 2022.

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Everyday to the Extraordinary: Highlights From the Korean Collection
Place: Harn Museum of Art - Gainesville, 3259 Hull Road, Florida, USA
Date: Aug 27, 2020 to Jul 31, 2021
Detail: The exhibition Everyday to the Extraordinary: Highlights from the Korean Collection includes objects from everyday life alongside exemplars of artistic production. Ceramics in the exhibition span nearly 2,500 years of history, from the Three Kingdoms Period (57 BCE–668 CE) to the present, while paintings date from the Joseon Dynasty (1392–1910) and into the 20th century.

Religious painting and sculpture reflect the richness of the Buddhist tradition, the influence of the more indigenous practice of Shamanism, along with the undercurrents of Daoist philosophy and an omnipresent Confucian system of relationships.

Some everyday objects were initially meant for practical use but came to be appreciated as works of art as time passed and contexts shifted. Extraordinary objects on view were created for aesthetic appreciation during their own time. From our own standpoint in the 21st century, the lines sometimes blur and products of the quotidian (arts of everyday life) can appear as lovely as a landscape executed by a member of the scholar-literati. These genres come together in the exhibition to paint a fuller picture of Korean art and life and are supplemented by references to literature, cuisine, and the performing arts.

Hanging scrolls by Kim Hongdo (1745–c.1806) and Kim Eunho (1892–1979) will be on view for the first time in over 15 years, as prior to conservation they were too fragile to display. Preservation work completed in Seoul by the JungJae Conservation Center has illuminated the extraordinary work of these versatile court painters. Kim Hongdo (Dan Won) was one of the most eminent painters of the Joseon Dynasty and is well-known for his paintings of daily life.

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Hokusai's Mount Fuji
Place: The Honolulu Museum of Art - Honolulu, 900 South Beretania Street, Hawaii, USA
Date: Oct 01, 2020 to Sep 30, 2021
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Shrine Room Projects: Shiva Ahmadi /Genesis Breyer P-Orridge / Tsherin Sherpa
Place: The Rubin Museum of Art - New York, 150 West 17th St., USA
Date: Oct 11, 2020 to Nov 12, 2021
Detail: In dialogue with the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room at the center of the gallery, artists Shiva Ahmadi, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and Tsherin Sherpa each reinterpret traditional and religious iconography and practices through sculptural installation, painting, and video.

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The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room
Place: The Rubin Museum of Art - New York, 150 West 17th St., USA
Date: Oct 11, 2020 to Jan 01, 2022
Detail: Since it first opened, the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room has been one of the most popular installations at the Rubin Museum, providing an immersive experience inspired by a traditional shrine.

Art and ritual objects are displayed as they would in an elaborate private household shrine, a space used for offerings, devotional prayer, rituals, and contemplation. The design of the Shrine Room showcases these objects while incorporating elements of traditional Tibetan architecture and the color schemes of Tibetan homes.

For Museum visitors, this richly detailed, immersive installation provides an oasis for peaceful contemplation at the heart of the Rubin Museum.

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Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice across Asia
Place: Freer Gallery of Art / Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution - Washington, D.C., 1050 Independence Ave SW, USA
Date: Oct 14, 2020 to Jan 17, 2022
Detail: Encounter Buddhist art through the lens of spiritual practice and the perspectives of practitioners. Drawing on the Freer|Sackler’s collections from across Asia, this exhibition expands the understanding of Buddhism in Asian art through both beautiful objects and immersive spaces. Visitors can step into a Tibetan Buddhist shrine, travel the Buddhist world with an eighth-century Korean monk, visit a Sri Lankan stupa, meet teachers and guardians, and discover multiple Buddhas and bodhisattvas. Encountering the Buddha illuminates the ways in which art and place embody and express the teachings of Buddhism.

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With New Light: Mia’s Reinstalled Himalayan, South, and Southeast Asian Art Galleries
Place: Minneapolis Institute of Art - Minneapolis, 2400 Third Avenue South, USA
Date: Oct 15, 2020 to Oct 17, 2021
Detail: Fresh and engaging displays reintroduce audiences to the interconnected, immensely diverse artistic traditions of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas. Collection highlights, such as a recently conserved 1,000-year-old Indian sculpture of Shiva Nataraja, commingle with new acquisitions, important loans, and extraordinary objects—some at Mia since 1917—on view for the first time. Within each gallery, multiple narratives aim to disentangle complicated histories, evoke reflection, and celebrate the artists who created, and continue to create, a bountiful variety of expressive forms.

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Intimate Space: A Noblewoman’s Bedroom in Late Imperial China
Place: Minneapolis Institute of Art - Minneapolis, 2400 Third Avenue South, Minnesota, USA
Date: Nov 14, 2020 to Nov 07, 2021
Detail: In the male-dominated society of imperial China, most women were physically restricted to domestic spaces. The center of a woman’s life was the bedroom, where she would sit alone or with others, working or pursuing leisurely activities. The furniture and artwork featured in this exhibition, all drawn from Mia’s outstanding collection of Chinese art, would have been found in a typical imperial Chinese woman’s bedroom. These objects reflected a woman’s educated and well-read social status, while also indicating her subordinate position as a woman in a man’s world.

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Captive Beauties: Depictions of Women in Late Imperial China
Place: Minneapolis Institute of Art - Minneapolis, 2400 Third Avenue South, USA
Date: Dec 14, 2020 to Nov 28, 2021
Detail: Beautiful yet lonely and melancholy—women from imperial China were often depicted in terms of their highly circumscribed lives, which were entirely dependent upon men. In some paintings, women engage in duties appropriate to their stations in life, according to patriarchal Confucian principles. Other paintings show women with fanciful coiffures and silk dresses, serving as musicians or courtesans, existing to please men. Literary and visual artists often compared women to flowers: refined and delicate yet fragile, their beauty (meaning marriageability) transient.

But some artists hinted at suppressed urges and unacknowledged emotions, reflecting a growing interest in the inner lives of their subjects. In their paintings we see the equivalent of the following verses, sung by the female protagonist in the play The Peony Pavilion (1598). Confined to the inner quarters of her home, she laments a brilliantly flowering spring scene in her isolated garden.

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Conservation in Action: Japanese Buddhist Sculpture in a New Light
Place: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, Massachusetts, USA
Date: Dec 15, 2020 to Jul 03, 2022
Detail: A rare, behind-the-scenes look at the conservation of seven Buddhist sculptures.

Visitors are invited to watch as objects conservators study and treat seven Japanese Buddhist sculptures in a public conservation studio. The wooden figures—images of worship depicting Buddhas, Guardian Kings, and a Wisdom King—are decorated with polychromy or gilding and date from the 9th to the 12th centuries. The conservation project occupies an entire gallery in the Museum, allowing visitors to observe the techniques employed by objects conservators as they carefully clean the sculptures and secure areas of loose paint, lacquer, and gilding. The sculptures have been relocated from the Museum's beloved Japanese Buddhist Temple Room, where they normally reside, enabling museum-goers to see the objects in a new setting for the first time in decades. Also on exhibit are three sculptures from storage that serve as points of comparison to exemplify different sculptural techniques, styles, and states of preservation.

The public studio also provides a space for conservators and curators to look closely at the sculptures in collaboration with the Museum's research scientists, identifying the original artists' materials, documenting early restorations, and working with wood anatomists in Japan to confirm the wood identifications. When the project is complete, the sculptures will return to the refurbished Japanese Buddhist Temple Room.

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Tempus Fugit :: 光陰矢の如し:: Time Flies
Place: Harn Museum of Art - Gainesville, 3259 Hull Road, Florida, USA
Date: Dec 21, 2020 to Feb 27, 2022
Detail: The exhibition Tempus Fugit:: 光陰矢の如し:: Time Flies is a reflection on time and its many meanings. This broad concept has been applied to the Japanese art collections at the Harn Museum as an investigative tool to look at how time has been measured in the visual record, how art objects can portray several moments in time, and how artists experience time during the production of their work. The celebration of the natural world, through life cycles and the acknowledgment of mortality and the change of the seasons, is also a recurring theme in Japanese art and celebrated within this exhibition.

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Masters and Masterpieces: Chinese Art from the Florence and Herbert Irving Collection
Place: The Met Fifth Avenue - New York, 1000 Fifth Avenue, USA
Date: Jan 29, 2021 to Jun 05, 2022
Detail: An outstanding selection of Chinese art gifted to The Met by Florence and Herbert Irving is the focus of this exhibition. Beginning in the early 1970s, the Irvings built one of the most comprehensive and superb collections of Chinese art in the world. For more than three decades, the couple helped The Met acquire important artworks and provided support for exhibitions, and their passion was a factor in building the current exhibition galleries dedicated to Chinese decorative arts. Their generous gifts of more than five hundred exceptional objects fundamentally transformed the holdings of Chinese art at The Met.

The approximately 120 works on display (in each rotation) cover almost all major categories of Chinese art, with a focus on three-dimensional objects, including lacquer, ceramic, metal work, jade, bamboo, and stone carvings. Created by both famous and unknown masters, these extraordinary works represent the artistic sophistication and technical virtuosity of Chinese decorative arts from the tenth through the early twentieth century. In addition to the Irvings’ well-known assemblage of lacquer ware, the exhibition also showcases their recent gifts of a group of jade and bamboo works from the eighteenth-century imperial workshop that have never before been on display. This presentation reunites important private loans formerly in the Irvings’ collection with comparative pieces from The Met collection.

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Masterworks: A Journey through Himalayan Art
Place: The Rubin Museum of Art - New York, 150 West 17th St., USA
Date: Jan 29, 2021 to Jan 08, 2024
Detail: Masterworks: A Journey through Himalayan Art explores major strands in the development of art from the Himalayan region covering a period of more than one thousand years, with objects drawn primarily from the Rubin Museum’s collection.

Masterworks is organized geographically and chronologically, showcasing the diverse regional traditions of Tibet in relation to the neighboring areas of Eastern India, Kashmir, Nepal, Bhutan, China, and Mongolia. Juxtaposing the art of Himalayan regions over time sheds light on the geographic, historical, religious, and artistic interrelationships among these cultures.

This ongoing exhibition reflects our evolving understanding of the relatively young field of Himalayan art. Masterworks is regularly updated as new art objects and texts come to light, reflecting the latest developments in the field. The current iteration features several loans from the Zhiguan Museum of Fine Art, which brings further depth to the themes and extraordinary craftsmanship demonstrated throughout the exhibition.

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Shiki: The Four Seasons in Japanese Art
Place: Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College - Claremont, 251 E. 11th St., California, USA
Date: Jan 30, 2021 to Aug 01, 2021
Detail: This exhibition of Japanese art from the Scripps College collection gathers together works featuring the most common seasonal motifs. Traditionally, these works would have been displayed in the home, used to serve food and drink or worn on the person as a way of deepening the connection between the owner and the particular season. From bamboo in the snow on a gilded folding screen to chrysanthemums on a lacquered hair comb, these seasonal references play an integral role in the cultural and emotional lives of the Japanese people.

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Celebrating the Year of the Ox
Place: The Met Fifth Avenue - New York, 1000 Fifth Avenue, USA
Date: Jan 30, 2021 to Jan 17, 2022
Detail: The traditional East Asian lunar calendar consists of a repeating 12–year cycle, with each year corresponding to one of the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac. The association of these creatures with the Chinese calendar began in the third century B.C. and became firmly established by the first century A.D. The 12 animals are, in sequence: rat, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, ram, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig. Each is believed to embody certain traits that are manifested in the personalities of the people born in that year. This Lunar New Year, which begins on February 12, 2021, is the Year of the Ox.

In celebration of the Year of the Ox, this exhibition presents depictions of oxen and water buffalo (considered the same category of animals in China) created by artists in the last 3,000 years. Particularly notable are a massive eighteenth-century jade sculpture of a water buffalo and a remarkable eighth-century set of ceramic Chinese zodiac figures, illustrating the important role that the animals play in the life of humans.

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Interrogating Beauties
Place: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College - Oberlin, 87 North Main Street, Ohio, USA
Date: Feb 19, 2021 to Aug 13, 2021
Detail: In the genre of Japanese art known today as “pictures of beauties,” or bijinga, the subject seems self-evident: images of beautiful women. The 25 works in this exhibition call that assumption into question, interrogating the origins, reception, and evolution of these pictures from the 18th to the early 20th centuries.

Developed in Japan during the Edo Period (1615–1868), bijinga were created for the vibrant realm of popular entertainment known as the “floating world,” or ukiyo, which included theaters, restaurants, tea houses, brothels, and other attractions. Central to the floating world was the entertainment district known as the Yoshiwara, an area in Edo designated for licensed prostitution.

A place of extremes, the Yoshiwara was home to a rich culture of literature, poetry, and visual and performing arts, and represented a subversive, alternative world of status in a period of rigid social hierarchy. Yet, by today’s standards, the district was also a space for the brutal exploitation of women and young men in a system of indentured sexual servitude. The origin of beauty pictures is similarly conflicted; these works were richly imagined by master artists and craftsmen, but, as advertisements for this floating world, were fully complicit in its harsh realities.

As Japan industrialized and became a global power in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, artists adapted to changing markets both inside and outside of Japan. The newly designated art genre of pictures of beauties seemingly moved from promoting the commodification of women’s bodies to simply objectifying them for visual pleasure. But a more complex role for bijinga—one that reflected both women’s inner lives and their evolving roles in modern Japan—can be found in the frontispieces, or kuchi-e, made for popular novels and literary magazines.

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The Goddess Shield: Recent Acquisitions in South Asian Art
Place: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College - Oberlin, 87 North Main Street, Ohio, USA
Date: Feb 19, 2021 to Sep 10, 2021
Detail: This small installation introduces the Goddess Shield, an important addition to the AMAM Asian art collection. The shield and another recent acquisition, the small painting Raja Prithi Singh Meeting Zabardast Kahn, are shown with related works from the collection that highlight the dynamic synthesis of Indian and Persian culture that arose in South Asia during the Mughal Empire of the 16th to 19th centuries.

This vast and powerful state ruled much of what is today India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Afghanistan. The Mughals, who originated in Central Asia, had close ties with the Safavid rulers of Persia, today’s Iran. Persian art and culture were revered at the Mughal court, and Persian was its official language. Equally influential, however, were the Rajput kingdoms of northern India, with whom the Mughals had close political and cultural ties.

The harmonious blending of Persian and Indian traditions resulted, on a grand scale, in the Taj Mahal, one of the world’s most recognized buildings, and, on a smaller scale, in works like the paintings and decorative arts seen in this show.

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Sun Xun: Mythological Time
Place: Vancouver Art Gallery - Vancouver, 750 Hornby Street, Canada
Date: Feb 20, 2021 to Sep 06, 2021
Detail: Sun Xun is a mid-career Chinese artist who works in a range of mediums including painting, drawing, animation, video and installation. In his highly imaginative video installation Mythological Time (2016), Sun takes viewers on a journey through his hometown of Fuxin in northern China, a coal-mining centre facing the depletion of its economic lifeblood.

Sun’s video installation from the Gallery’s collection will be presented alongside a major 30-metre ink painting, titled Mythology or Rebellious Bone (2020), being shown for the first time.

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Japan: A History of Style
Place: The Met Fifth Avenue - New York, 1000 Fifth Avenue, USA
Date: Mar 08, 2021 to Apr 24, 2022
Detail: This exhibition celebrates how gifts and acquisitions of the last decade have transformed The Met’s ability to narrate the story of Japanese art by both expanding and deepening the range of remarkable artworks that can meaningfully elucidate the past. Each of the ten rooms that make up the Arts of Japan Galleries features a distinct genre, school, or style, representing an array of works in nearly every medium, from ancient times to the present. Highlights include the debut of a spectacular group of contemporary metalwork by Living National Treasures and emerging artists, and, in the first rotation, a selection of woodblock prints from the Lee E. Dirks Collection.

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Animal Fables of Mughal India
Place: Cleveland Museum of Art - Cleveland, 11150 East Boulevard, USA
Date: Mar 12, 2021 to Aug 29, 2021
Detail: Moralizing fables involving animal characters traversed the Indo-Iranian world for centuries. At times, they were written down and collected into volumes; when made for a wealthy patron, the manuscripts were illustrated. On view are paintings from five animal fables included in the museum’s nearly complete Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) manuscript plus one scene from an Anwar-i Suhaili (Lights of Canopus). The stories include the tale of how a leopard and fox endeavored to devour the children of a sharp-witted woman, the justification for why the creatures of the ocean could not deliver a message from their king, and the adventures of a prince who fed a snake a piece of his own flesh to save the life of a frog.

The paintings were produced in the Mughal manuscript atelier of the young emperor Akbar (reigned 1556–1605), who employed Indian artists working under the direction of Persian masters from Iran. Made from a wide palette of costly mineral pigments and gold, the bright colors and evocative scenes were designed to appeal to the royal patron and serve as a source of courtly entertainment.

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Awaken: A Tibetan Buddhist Journey Toward Enlightenment
Place: The Rubin Museum of Art - New York, 150 West 17th St., USA
Date: Mar 12, 2021 to Jan 03, 2022
Detail: Unplug, step away from the chaos, and embark on a journey of self-knowledge and transformation with Awaken.

Awaken presents the Tibetan Buddhist path to enlightenment with 37 artworks from the 7th to the 21st century, drawn largely from the collections of the Rubin Museum of Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

As you navigate the exhibition, you’ll learn how powerful artworks, such as sculptures, hanging scroll paintings, illuminated manuscript pages, and ritual items, help practitioners develop awareness and recognize that everything is interconnected. Inspired by the journey to awakening, you may begin to realize that your own perspective is changing and glimpse into what is known as the awakened state of mind.
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Saitō Kiyoshi: Graphic Awakening
Place: The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art - Sarasota, 5401 Bay Shore Road, Florida, USA
Date: Mar 14, 2021 to Aug 15, 2021
Detail: Saitō Kiyoshi’s (1907–1997) keen sense of design, superb technique and engagement with an appealing variety of themes made him one of the best known and most popular Japanese print artists of the twentieth century.

In the wake of the Second World War, Saitō emerged as a seminal figure of the modernist creative print movement, in which artists claimed complete authorship of their work by carving and printing their own designs. He flourished as the movement attracted patrons among members of the occupying forces and, later, Western travelers for business and pleasure. Honors at the 1951 São Paulo Biennial launched him and the creative print movement to prominence at home and abroad. When new diplomatic ties between the U.S. and Japan provided opportunities for Japanese artists to exhibit, teach, and live abroad, Saitō was among the first to do so, thus further broadening his audience.

Presenting recent donations of artworks by Saitō from Charles and Robyn Citrin to The Ringling and other collections, Saitō Kiyoshi: Graphic Awakening is the first comprehensive exhibition of this artist’s work in the United States. The exhibition focuses on prints Saitō created in the 1940s and 50s, arguably the most vibrant period of his career, and includes several rare, early designs.

The exhibition is accompanied by a 200-page illustrated catalogue edited by Rhiannon Paget and with essays by Paul Binnie, Noriko Kuwahara, Rhiannon Paget, and Judith A. Stubbs, and published by Scala.

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Bodhisattvas of Wisdom, Compassion, and Power
Place: The Met Fifth Avenue - New York, 1000 Fifth Avenue, USA
Date: Mar 27, 2021 to Oct 16, 2022
Detail: Within the Buddhist traditions of the Himalayas, three bodhisattvas emerge as personifications of Buddhist ideals. Manjushri, who cuts through ignorance and personifies correct knowledge; Avalokiteshvara, a compassionate protector of the devout that helps reveal the true nature of reality; and Vajrapani as the embodiment of the energy of enlightenment. Focusing on dramatic images, a worshipper could first evoke the subtle knowledge that Manjushri personifies, then with Avalokiteshvara’s aid, it is possible to proceed in a way free from self-imposed delusions, while Vajrapani’s transcendent power aids in destroying jealousy and hatred that stand in the way of enlightenment. Venerating these three bodhisattvas together has a long history, and they play an essential role in the introduction of Buddhism to Tibet. This exhibition draws together a dramatic group of paintings, sculptures, ritual objects, and illustrated manuscripts from the eleventh to eighteenth centuries, made primarily for Nepal and Tibet’s monastic institutions. Beautifully cast sculptures and accessible paintings showing peaceful manifestations of the bodhisattvas intended for the public are juxtaposed with complex tantric images of the highest quality done in portable media made for monastic elites. Vajrayana images offered powerful ways to access these bodhisattvas as a personal path to enlightenment, though often undertaking such rituals was done with a ruler’s sponsorship for the people’s benefit. This exhibition presents some of the sublime representations of these three bodhisattvas at the center of this great devotional tradition embraced across the Himalayas.

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Shimmering Surfaces: Chinese Lacquer Motifs and Techniques
Place: Minneapolis Institute of Art - Minneapolis, 2400 Third Avenue South, Minnesota, USA
Date: Mar 31, 2021 to Apr 10, 2022
Detail: Lacquer art has a long history in China, beginning more than 5,000 years ago. Richly decorated lacquer wares often invoke themes and ideas intended to bring wealth, health, moral ethics, good luck, longevity, and even immortality to their owners—and also communicate their wealth and status. Featuring works from Mia’s collection, this installation showcases a wide variety of forms, styles, and techniques, as well as an array of themes that remain significant in Chinese culture even today.

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Weng Family Collection of Chinese Painting: Travel and Home
Place: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston - Boston, 465 Huntington Avenue, Massachusetts, USA
Date: Apr 03, 2021 to Mar 06, 2022
Detail: In China, poets and artists often express their passion for places through their art forms. While the generic landscape is a basic theme in Chinese painting, many works also display artists’ emotions about specific locations or longing for their hometowns.

In 2018 and 2019, Wan-go H. C. Weng (1918–2020) made the largest gift of Chinese paintings and calligraphy to the MFA in the institution’s history, comprising more than 230 objects acquired and passed down through six generations of his family. This exhibition features approximately 20 works from the gift that relate to travel and home—concepts that have taken on new depths of meaning since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, when people all over the world were largely confined to their houses.

“Weng Family Collection of Chinese Painting: Travel and Home” includes paintings and calligraphy by some of the greatest masters from the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. Luo Pin’s Sites of Su Shi’s Travels (1780) traces the route of the 11th-century poet and scholar Su Shi. Multiple works represent the art and regional culture of Changshu, the Weng family’s hometown. A masterpiece among them is Ten Thousand Miles along the Yangzi River (1699), a 53-foot-long scroll by Wang Hui, one of the Qing dynasty’s most prominent artists and a native of Changshu. The most recent work in the exhibition, a short color film by Wan-go Weng himself titled A Town by the Yangtze (1948), presents a pre-modern Chinese cityscape—including scenes of daily life and architecture—recorded in Changshu in 1948.

This is the second in a series of three exhibitions celebrating the landmark donation made by Wan-go H. C. Weng, a longtime supporter of the MFA who, until he passed away in 2020 at the age of 102, devoted his life to the preservation, study, and promotion of China’s cultural heritage.

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Rinpa (琳派)
Place: Cleveland Museum of Art - Cleveland, 11150 East Boulevard, USA
Date: Apr 23, 2021 to Oct 03, 2021
Detail: Rinpa is a style of Japanese art focused on abstracted natural motifs and allusions to classical literature. Coined in the early 1900s, Rinpa means “Rin School,” after painter Ogata Kōrin (1658–1716), whose work was critical to the later transmission of the tradition. Three techniques associated with Rinpa are tarashikomi, horinuri, and mokkotsu. In tarashikomi (dripping-in), the artist drips ink or color on wet surfaces, creating pooling effects. Horinuri (painting-by-carving) leaves initial ink outlines uncovered after shapes are filled with ink or color, so the surface looks carved. Mokkotsu (boneless) entails creating shapes without contours or lines defining edges and boundaries.

This rotation tells the story of later Rinpa style, introducing works by important artists active in the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s, including Kōrin and his brother Ogata Kenzan (1663–1743); Sakai Hōitsu (1761–1828), the Edo-based (present-day Tokyo) dynamo who revolutionized Rinpa painting; and Kamisaka Sekka (1866–1942), the Kyoto-based master of graphic design who delighted with his prints and drawings. (Gallery 235A)

Also, on view for the first time since 2014 are treasures of early Japanese Buddhist sculpture in bronze and wood, as well as an indigo-dyed sacred Buddhist sutra scroll written in gold and silver. A gorgeously woven silk Buddhist monk’s garment called a kesa is also on display. (Gallery 235B)

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Clay and Paper: Japanese Ceramics and Screens
Place: Phoenix Art Museum - Phoenix, 1625 North Central Ave., Arizona, USA
Date: Apr 24, 2021 to Apr 24, 2022
Detail: Clay and Paper: Japanese Ceramics and Screens presents an array of functional and decorative modern ceramics and traditional screens from the island nation.

In traditional Japan, palaces and castles were designed with large interior spaces that could be divided as needed with large, movable, folding screens. Made with wooden framework covered with paper, screens were both functional and decorative. Artists from different schools of painting were commissioned to paint subtle landscapes or colorful processional and festive scenes that flowed across both screens in a pair. These images often evoked a particular season or celebration.

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Splendid Visions: Gifts from the Robert and Amy Clague Collections
Place: Phoenix Art Museum - Phoenix, 1625 North Central Ave., Arizona, USA
Date: Apr 24, 2021 to Apr 24, 2022
Detail: Splendid Visions: Gifts from the Robert and Amy Clague Collections features examples of Chinese cloisonné and bronzes, Chinese textiles, Hindu and Buddhist manuscript covers, and more donated to Phoenix Art Museum by the Clague family.

Throughout its 60-year history, Phoenix Art Museum has developed a distinctive collection of Asian art through gifts from local collectors, whose legacy of generosity benefits visitors of all ages and will do so for generations to come. This spirit of visionary philanthropy characterized Robert and Amy Clague, both of whom passed away in 1995 and 2020, respectively. Although their individual interests varied, the Clagues each assembled collections that earned international acclaim for the Museum. Robert Clague collected Chinese cloisonné and, later, Chinese bronzes, while Amy Clague collected Chinese and Southeast Asian textiles, as well as Hindu and Buddhist manuscript covers. Through their unique interests, the Clagues inspired each other to seek works of art that depict life experiences different from their own, with compositions rich in cultural meaning and religious symbolism. Most importantly, they shared a vision of Phoenix Art Museum as a place in which all people might learn about the peoples and cultures of Asia.

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The Golden Temple: Center of Sikh Faith
Place: Phoenix Art Museum - Phoenix, 1625 North Central Ave., Arizona, USA
Date: Apr 24, 2021 to Apr 24, 2022
Detail: Featuring watercolor paintings, photographs, prints, and more, The Golden Temple: Center of Sikh Faith showcases the enduring splendor of Sikhism’s central spiritual monument. Located in what is today the city of Amritsar, in the Punjab state of northwestern India, the Harmandir Sahib (the Punjabi term for “The Golden Temple”) is the centralized place of worship for all Sikhs. The idea for the temple was conceived by Guru Arjan Sahib (1563-1606), the fifth Sikh Guru. In 1577, a town and water tank were built on the site where the temple would be erected, and construction on the building began in 1588, with a Muslim saint laying the cornerstone. The Guru’s design for The Golden Temple placed the monument at the center of the water tank. A causeway connected the sacred structure to a circumambulatory path, and doors on the temple’s four sides symbolized the accessibility of the Sikh faith, which makes no distinction between the four Hindu castes. Builders completed construction in 1601, but through the decades, The Golden Temple was destroyed several times. The present structure dates to 1764, and renovations over the centuries introduced various design elements. The temple’s upper floors, for example, are now covered in 750 kilos of pure gold, an addition made by Maharaja Ranjit Singh, founder of the Sikh Empire of India (1799-1849).

Spanning the 19th century through the 21th century, The Golden Temple: Center of Sikh Faith presents historical and contemporary works depicting the renowned site, which harmoniously blends art and architectural elements from the Hindu and Muslim traditions. Featured works include images by Felice Beato, one of the first photographers to capture images of Asia, and watercolors, prints, and paintings by Indian and American artists who have visited the temple in the past two centuries. The exhibition culminates with works by both Sikh and non-Sikh contemporary artists whose visual narratives draw inspiration from The Golden Temple and its intricate, extraordinary design.

The Golden Temple: Center of Sikh Faith is presented in the Khanuja Family Sikh Heritage Gallery, the second gallery space in the United States dedicated exclusively to the exhibition of Sikh art. The exhibition continues the Museum’s initiative to showcase artwork and objects that explore themes of Sikh history and visual culture.

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Lasting Impressions: Japanese Prints from the Read-Simms Collection
Place: The Gibbes Museum of Art - Charleston, 135 Meeting St, South Carolina, USA
Date: Apr 30, 2021 to Oct 03, 2021
Detail: The Gibbes Museum of Art is home to one of the most significant collections of Japanese woodblock prints in the Southeast. This exhibition will present 60 exceptional and rare prints amassed by Charleston collector, Motte Alston Read, and his sister, Mary Read Hume Simms of New Orleans, during the first decades of the 20th century. The Read-Simms Collection reflects the full range of popular print subjects by master Ukiyo-e artists of the Edo period, from famous Kabuki theater actors portrayed by Suzuki Harunobu and Tōshūsai Sharaku in the 18th century, to vibrant landscapes by Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai in the 19th century.

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Interpretation of Materiality: Gold
Place: Cleveland Museum of Art - Cleveland, 11150 East Boulevard, USA
Date: Apr 30, 2021 to Oct 24, 2021
Detail: Due to its remarkable malleability and durability, gold has been widely used in artifacts for the wealthy and for royalty since the fifth millennium BC. In Korean art, this precious mineral was the main material for luxury goods during the Three Kingdoms period (57 BC−668). In The Book of Pleasant Journeys into Faraway Lands, the author Muhammad al-Idrisi (1099−1166) writes: “Gold is too common in the Silla kingdom. Even the dog’s leash and the monkey’s collar are made of gold.”

This exhibition illuminates how Korean artists from ancient times to the present day creatively used and interpreted gold and its distinctive materiality. One highlight is the 13th-century Buddhist text Avatamsaka Sutra No. 78. Mixed with ink and glue, refined gold powder was applied on the smooth surface of the dark blue, indigo-dyed mulberry paper. In the practice of copying a Buddhist sutra, gold served as the perfect medium to visualize the splendid world of Buddhas and their awakening teachings.

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Setting the Bar: Arts of the Song dynasty
Place: Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution - Washington, D.C., 1050 Independence Ave SW, USA
Date: May 01, 2021 to Jul 31, 2021
Detail: @ Gallery 15

China’s Song dynasty established many prototypes in government, society, and the arts. A system of schools and examinations for entering public office led to an efficient, centralized government headed by the emperor but staffed by well-educated commoners. Emerging as a class of scholar-officials, who were both artists themselves and consumers of art, these men looked to ancient tradition as a source for moral principle and creative inspiration.

At the same time, a spirit of inquiry and close examination of nature led to advances in art and science. Widespread gains in literacy and disposable income also stimulated growth in the arts.

Elegance and refinement in form, line, and color characterize the visual arts of China during the Song dynasty. As new technology enhanced ceramic production and the number of kilns rose, fresh approaches to decoration developed. The rise of ink painting paralleled a taste for monochrome ceramic glazes. A multitude of other painting styles and techniques emerged as well, with a strong preference for realistic detail, modulated colors, and individualized faces and postures.

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Cosmoscapes: Ink Paintings by Tai Xiangzhou
Place: The Art Institute of Chicago - Chicago, 111 South Michigan Avenue, Illinois, USA
Date: May 06, 2021 to Sep 20, 2021
Detail: The monochromatic ink paintings of Chinese artist and scholar Tai Xiangzhou bridge the gulf between ancient traditions and contemporary artistic practice.

Combining elements of Chinese philosophy with modern astronomy, Tai creates landscapes in the realist style of the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and semiabstract expanses of rocks and clouds floating in extraterrestrial worlds.

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Painting Enlightenment: Experiencing Wisdom and Compassion through Art and Science
Place: Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens - Delray Beach, 4000 Morikami Park Road, Florida, USA
Date: May 08, 2021 to Sep 19, 2021
Detail: Painting Enlightenment: Experiencing Wisdom and Compassion through Art and Science features works by Japanese scientist and artist Iwasaki Tsuneo (1917-2002). The paintings create a contemplative journey and meditations on the interconnectedness of the universe. Iwasaki collapses distinctions between image, text and thought with imagery representative of both scientific phenomena and Buddhist principles. He forms the images by using characters from the sacred Buddhist text, the Heart Sutra.

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Amano Kazumi: Prints from the Kimm-Grufferman Collection
Place: Minneapolis Institute of Art - Minneapolis, 2400 Third Ave. South, USA
Date: May 30, 2021 to Nov 29, 2021
Detail: In 1964, a young David Hockney won First Prize at the International Exhibition of Drawings and Engravings in Lugano, Switzerland; at the same event, Amano Kazumi received an excellence award for prints of his abstract Moral series. Amano first studied under Munakata Shikō, Japan’s best-known contemporary print artist, who is famous for his roughly executed black-and-white designs. Amano’s early works emulate Munakata’s style but take on subjects of his home, Toyama, such as dances associated with the iron mills. In the early 1960s, Amano radically changed his style and from then on created abstract shapes in strong and bright colors. In 1971, Amano left Japan and moved with his family to New York. This exhibition focuses on Amano’s time in Japan and presents prints from the extensive collection of Sue Y. S. Kimm and Seymour Grufferman.

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Shahzia Sikander: Extraordinary Realities
Place: The Morgan Library & Museum - New York, 225 Madison Avenue, USA
Date: Jun 18, 2021 to Sep 26, 2021
Detail: Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is internationally celebrated for bringing Indo-Persian miniature-painting traditions into dialogue with contemporary art practice. This exhibition tracks the first fifteen years of this artistic journey, from her groundbreaking deconstruction of miniature painting in Pakistan to the development of a new personal vocabulary at RISD, expanded explorations around identity as a Core fellow at the Glassell School of Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and her global outlook during her first years in New York. During this period, Sikander richly interrogated gender, sexuality, race, class, and history, creating open-ended narratives that have sustained her work as one of the most significant artists working today.

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Buddha, Shiva, Lotus, Dragon: The Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection at Asia Society
Place: Kimbell Art Museum - Fort Worth, 3333 Camp Bowie Boulevard, Texas, USA
Date: Jun 27, 2021 to Sep 05, 2021
Detail: Buddha, Shiva, Lotus, Dragon: The Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection at Asia Society presents nearly 70 of the finest examples of Asian art in the United States.

This exhibition showcases the extraordinary range of bronzes, ceramics and metalwork that John D. Rockefeller 3rd (1906–1978) and his wife, Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller (1909–1992), thoughtfully assembled between the 1940s and the 1970s. With highlights including spectacular Chinese vases, dynamic Indian Chola bronzes and exquisite Southeast Asian sculptures, the exhibition reveals great achievements in Asian art spanning more than two millennia. This selection of masterpieces drawn from Asia Society’s permanent collection is a visually stunning presentation that illuminates social and artistic histories from across Asia and underscores the visual arts’ capacity to encourage cross-cultural dialogue.

This exhibition represents a special opportunity to experience the unparalleled quality of the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection outside of its home at Asia Society Museum in New York City. In addition to investigating themes of Buddhist sculpture, Hindu sculpture and ceramics and metalwork, the show also examines the Rockefellers’ connoisseurship as well as their collecting and exhibition practices in an age when political and economic circumstances informed the reception and availability of Asian artworks in the United States. With an emphasis on beauty, ingenuity and tradition, this exhibition manifests the dynamic ideas and philosophies that animate histories of Asian art and renews the Rockefellers’ vision of promoting a deep understanding of different cultures through experiences with astonishing works of art.

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Companions in Solitude: Reclusion and Communion in Chinese Art
Place: The Met Fifth Avenue - New York, 1000 Fifth Avenue, USA
Date: Jul 31, 2021 to Aug 14, 2022
Detail: This exhibition will explore the twin themes of solitude and togetherness in Chinese art. For more than two thousand years, reclusion—removing oneself from society—has been presented as the ideal condition for mental cultivation and transcending worldly troubles. At the same time, communion with like-minded people has been celebrated as essential to the human experience. This choice, to be alone or to be together, has been central to the lives of thinkers and artists, and Chinese art abounds with images of figures who pursued both paths—as well as those who wove them together in complex and surprising ways. Companions in Solitude, presented in two rotations, will bring together more than 120 works of painting, calligraphy, and decorative arts that illuminate this choice—depictions of why and how people have sought space from the world or attempted to bridge the divide between themselves and others. In the wake of 2020, a year that has isolated us physically but connected us virtually in unprecedented ways, this exploration of premodern Chinese reclusion and communion will invite meditation on the fracture and facture of human connection in our own time.

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Likeness and Legacy in Korean Portraiture
Place: Asian Art Museum - San Francisco, 200 Larkin St., California, USA
Date: Aug 27, 2021 to Oct 31, 2021
Detail: Rare 18th-century portraits and contemporary works explore the deep history of portraiture in Korean culture.

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Hokusai: Mad about Painting
Place: Smithsonian Institution - Washington, 1050 Independence Ave SW, USA
Date: Aug 28, 2021 to Jan 09, 2022
Detail: Japanese artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849) may be best known for his iconic woodblock print, The Great Wave Off the Coast of Kanagawa, but few are familiar with another work, a breathtaking painting titled Breaking Waves that was created fifteen years after Great Wave at the height of Hokusai’s career. This rarely seen painting—the culmination of Hokusai’s lifelong effort to capture the sea—is one of roughly fifty works on view in Hokusai: Mad about Painting. The exhibition, which originally opened at the Freer in the fall of 2019, was on view until the museum closed in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the museum’s impressive Hokusai collection, we are now giving visitors the opportunity to see a new presentation, with artworks being added throughout the summer. In addition to Breaking Waves, the exhibition includes works large and small, from folding screens and hanging scrolls to paintings and drawings. Also included are rare hanshita-e:drawings for woodblock prints that were adhered to the wood and were frequently destroyed in the process of carving a block prior to printing. Among the many featured works are Hokusai manga, his often humorous renderings of everyday life in Japan.
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Weaving Splendor: Treasures of Asian Textiles
Place: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art - Kansas City, 4525 Oak Street, USA
Date: Sep 25, 2021 to Mar 06, 2022
Detail: For the first time in decades, the Nelson-Atkins will display rarely seen Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and Persian clothing, costumes, and textiles. Made with fine materials, exemplary techniques, and artistry, Asian luxury textiles were central to global trade. The sumptuous textiles in this exhibition conveyed the identities, status, and taste of both local and international patrons and consumers. Luxurious costumes of the court performed power, while striking theater robes brought stage characters to life. Sturdy wall hangings and furniture covers transformed palaces, temples, and homes, while shimmering tapestry-woven carpets were created as diplomatic gifts for foreign rulers. The extraordinary stories of these treasures of the collection take visitors on an irreducible journey across continents, from the 1500s to today.

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Emily Eden: Portraits of the Princes and Peoples of India
Place: Phoenix Art Museum - Phoenix, 1625 North Central Ave., Arizona, USA
Date: Oct 01, 2021 to Nov 07, 2021
Detail: Emily Eden: Portraits of the Princes and Peoples of India offers a view of 19th-century India through the eyes of British novelist and artist Emily Eden.

Through more than 20 hand-painted lithographs on loan to the Museum from The Khanuja Family Collection, Emily Eden: Portraits of the Princes and Peoples of India offers a view of 19th-century India through the eyes of British novelist and artist Emily Eden. Eden traveled to India in 1836 with her brother, Lord Auckland, who served as Governor-General of India from 1836–42 and whose status provided Eden with unusual access to Indian royalty and the country’s remote regions. She documented her travels through both extensive letters, which she later published as a travel book, and detailed sketches, which she had privately printed as a set of lithographs upon her return to England in 1842. These works depict a range of subjects, from maharajas and servants, to camel drivers and the Sikh rulers of the Punjab, in exquisite detail through the eyes of an outsider.

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Seeking Immortality: Ancient Artifacts
Place: Phoenix Art Museum - Phoenix, 1625 North Central Ave., Arizona, USA
Date: Oct 01, 2021 to Nov 07, 2021
Detail: Seeking Immortality: Ancient Artifacts features ceramics and other objects from China, Japan, and Korea meant to accompany the dead into the afterlife.

Across the world, the question of how to bury the deceased is an important issue. Concerns with an afterlife and immortality have resulted in troves of artifacts that verify some of these beliefs in other times and places.

In Asia, deliberate mummification did not occur. The deceased were interred in tombs that reflected their status in this life and provided them with all that they might need in the next life, including protection from malevolent spirits. Some objects were used every day, whereas others were created specifically for burial. Often, pottery figures were substitutes for the burial of living servants and animals.

Seeking Immortality: Ancient Artifacts features objects from China, Japan, and Korea meant to accompany the dead into the afterlife. With ceramic replicas of servants and animals, figures meant to provide protection from harm, and more, this special installation explores how archaeology continues to reveal material culture that offers insight into what life and technology were like in ancient times.

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Colors of Sky and Clouds: Chinese Blue-and-White Porcelain
Place: Phoenix Art Museum - Phoenix, 1625 North Central Ave., Arizona, USA
Date: Oct 01, 2021 to Nov 07, 2021
Detail: Colors of Sky and Clouds: Chinese Blue-and-White Porcelain showcases white, hard-bodied porcelain objects featuring cobalt-blue illustrations of flowers and gardens, natural landscapes, and narrative scenes from Chinese literature.

The development of Chinese ceramics reveals an unrivaled history of resources, technique and aesthetics. Between the 1st and 10th centuries, Chinese potters gradually perfected a white vitreous porcelain made from rich deposits of kaolin clay fired at high temperatures at kiln sites in southeastern China. By the 13th and 14th centuries, artists began to paint designs on smooth, white, clay body surfaces in shades of cobalt-blue pigment. From that point, imperial patronage and export markets led to the creation of many forms with diverse and refined floral, landscape, and narrative illustrations. In the 17th century, foreign influences and new motifs derived from folk art and popular literature made these wares appealing to the merchant and scholar classes.

From the 1960s to the 1980s, Phoenix Art Museum received many gifts of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain from Dr. and Mrs. Matthew L. Wong. These works served as the genesis of the Museum’s Asian art collection.

Colors of Sky and Clouds: Chinese Blue-and-White Porcelain features more than 10 of these white, hard-bodied porcelain objects enhanced with cobalt-blue illustrations. Featured works are presented in pairs and showcase motifs such as flowers and gardens, natural landscapes, and narrative scenes of demons, monsters, and dragons drawn from Chinese literature.
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Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain
Place: Cleveland Museum of Art - Cleveland, 11150 East Boulevard, USA
Date: Nov 14, 2021 to Jan 01, 2022
Detail: Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia’s Sacred Mountain is the first exhibition dedicated to the art of one of the earliest major Hindu sites in Southeast Asia, Phnom Da (Stone Mountain), established around 1,500 years ago. Through a series of refined and immersive digital experiences, the exhibition presents the Cleveland Museum of Art’s monumental sandstone sculpture Krishna Lifting Mount Govardhan in the context of the landscape and sacred space from which it came. In honor of its most recent transformation, the newly restored Cleveland Krishna is showcased with nine related masterworks of stone sculpture on loan from Cambodia and France.

The significance of the mountain-raising episode from India’s myth of the superhuman child-god Krishna reached a high point between the AD 400s and 600s. At the same time, Southeast Asian people were beginning to adopt religious art, texts, and ritual practices from India, reconceived for their own purposes. In the Mekong River delta of southern Cambodia, which was a center of political power until the 700s, control of floodwaters meant economic success. The powerful image of Krishna holding up Mount Govardhan to shield his followers from destructive deluge held special relevance to the population of this region. In the exhibition, cinematic projections of 360-degree video with surround sound transport visitors to the canal ways of the Mekong delta to see how pilgrims journeyed by boat to the site where Krishna and his counterparts were worshiped.

The CMA is proud to collaborate with Microsoft and the Interactive Commons at Case Western Reserve University to offer an unprecedented mixed-reality audiovisual tour, embedded within the exhibition. Using Microsoft HoloLens 2 headsets, visitors are shown and guided through the captivating history of the Cleveland Krishna, from the ruins of an abandoned Cambodian cave temple to a glamorous Art Nouveau mansion in Brussels. The story continues with how the sculpture arrived in multiple pieces at the CMA, where conservators worked intensively for months in 1978 and again from 2017 to 2020 to restore and reconstruct the masterwork. A life-size holographic projection reveals how the Krishna sculpture would have looked completely restored, viewed from both outside and within the space of the ancient cave temple.

The exhibition also brings the Cleveland Krishna together with the seven other monumental sculptures depicting the gods of Phnom Da, seen together for the first time at true-to-life scale in elegant 3-D projections. Details and multiple views of each sculpture captured through high-resolution photogrammetry and laser scans are activated by visitors who can then see up close the awe-inspiring skill of the unknown master artists of ancient southern Cambodia. Revealing Krishna provides visitors with an entirely new and eye-opening experience in which digital media supports the understanding and appreciation of exceptional works of Cambodian art.

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Europe & Africa

USA & Canada | Asia

Roots and Changes – Gujarati Influences
Place: The Library at Willesden Green - Willesden, 95 High Rd, United Kingdom
Date: Mar 13, 2021 to Aug 22, 2021
Detail: What have the comedian Parle Patel, the politician Krupesh Hirani, the curator Dr. Sushma Jansari, the choreographer Urja Desai Thakore, the musician Sarathy Korwar and the head of Neasden Temple, Yogvivek Swami got in common?

They all have Gujarati roots which have considerably shaped and influenced the cultural landscape of London. Subrang Arts in collaboration with Brent Museum and Archives presents a multi-dimensional exhibition, with items on loan from the British Museum.

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Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective A Bouquet of Love I Saw in the Universe
Place: Gropius Bau - Berlin, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Germany
Date: Apr 23, 2021 to Aug 15, 2021
Detail: Presented across almost 3000 m², Yayoi Kusama: A Retrospective will offer an overview of the key periods in her oeuvre, which spans more than 70 years, and feature a number of current works as well as a newly realised Infinity Mirror Room.

The retrospective will focus primarily on tracing the development of Kusama’s creative output from her early paintings and accumulative sculptures to her immersive environments, as well exploring her lesser-known artistic activity in Germany and Europe.

Since the 1960s, the artist has been actively engaged in realising exhibition projects outside the former centre of her life in New York and showing her work in a European context. This has also brought to the fore Kusama’s role as a pioneer of personal branding, who early on in her practice intentionally staged and marketed her own artistic persona and multidisciplinary work.

Within the exhibition framework, reconstructions will allow viewers to experience the pioneering nature of her presentational forms and artistic subjects, making accessible Kusama’s early exhibition projects in Germany and Europe in the 1960s and central solo exhibitions in the USA and Asia from the 1950s to 1980s.

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Ryoji Ikeda
Place: 180 The Strand - London, Temple, United Kingdom
Date: May 20, 2021 to Aug 01, 2021
Detail: Home to the Vinyl Factory, 180 The Strand — also a hub for London Fashion Week — is turning its labyrinthine subterranean spaces over to sound and light artist Ryoji Ikeda, the largest European exhibition of his disorienting, immersive, data-driven art.

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Ogata Gekkō and his contemporaries
Place: Japanmuseum SieboldHuis - 2311 GE Leiden, Rapenburg 19, Netherlands
Date: May 26, 2021 to Aug 22, 2021
Detail: Japanese prints are characterized by the use of fixed composition rules, clean lines and clear areas of colour, but how different is in the oeuvre of Ogata Gekkō. His prints are associated with: Shin nishikie (new brocade prints). Gekkō's style is closer to painting, partly because of its very subtle colour transitions.

Gekkō is a self-taught artist who grew to become one of the leading artists of his time. His reputation rose not only because of his excellent technique, but also because of his versatility: in addition to prints, he also designed book illustrations, covers and impressive paintings on paper and silk. His popularity resulted in a large group of students, including the important 20th-century printmaker, Yamamura Kōka. Just before his death, Gekkō was referred to as one of the 'grand old men' of Japanese printmaking.

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Zheng Bo: Wanwu Council 萬物社
Place: Gropius Bau - Berlin, Niederkirchnerstraße 7, Germany
Date: Jun 21, 2021 to Aug 23, 2021
Detail: As In House: Artist in Residence 2020, the artist and theoretician Zheng Bo embarked on the question of how plants practice politics. In 2021, his exhibition Wanwu Council 萬物社 will expand upon themes that Zheng Bo worked on during his one-year residency at the Gropius Bau.

The Daoist term wanwu translates as “ten thousand things” or “myriad happenings” and embraces the infinite possibilities of life in all its forms. The exhibition premiers the first chapter of Zheng Bo’s film The Political Life of Plants 植物的政治生活 (2021), which has been filmed in Berlin and Brandenburg. It documents conversations with ecologists interspersed with experimental scenes. The series Drawing Life 寫生 (2020–21) brings together drawings of trees and weeds that Zheng Bo encountered over the 24 Solar Terms of one year. This daily drawing practice is a way of persistently staying close to these fellow beings. Wanwu Council 萬物社 takes this approach further: the exhibition will grow out of the Gropius Bau into the “Gropius Wood”, as Zheng Bo calls the community of plane trees that can be found to the west of the building.

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Modern Japanese Lacquer
Place: Rijksmuseum - Amsterdam, Museumstraat 1, Netherlands
Date: Jul 01, 2021 to Sep 04, 2021
Detail: There’s something magical about Japanese lacquer art. The decorations are made with exceptional care and skill using dozens of layers of lacquer in a process that takes months if not years.

In this exhibition, traditional depictions in gold, silver and black form the departure point for a journey into modernity, creativity and exuberant colours. The almost seventy objects on display trace this development in the early 20th century.

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Asia

USA & Canada | Europe & Africa

Ancient Religions
Place: Asian Civilisations Museum - Singapore, 1 Empress Place, Singapore
Date: Dec 12, 2017 to Dec 31, 2021
Detail: The ACM permanent galleries on Level 2 explore how artists have masterfully expressed complex ideas about life and existence with religions in sculpture and paintings. Beginning with the Ancient Religions exhibition, which explores early styles and motifs of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Jainism in India and how they spread to China and the larger Southeast Asia, the story continues in the following galleries as the art developed and evolved through the centuries.

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New Horizons: Ways of Seeing Hong Kong Art in the 80s and 90s
Place: Hong Kong Museum of Art - Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, 10 Salisbury Road, Hong Kong
Date: Mar 05, 2021 to Apr 24, 2022
Detail: This exhibition examines the crucial turning points, new trends and sensibilities in contemporary art in Hong Kong during the 1980s and 1990s. Taking the curator's experiences as a point of departure, the exhibition sheds light on the creative breakthroughs of young local artists in different mediums including installation art, new media and photography, which ushered in the rise of new artistic experimentation and formats. In addition to the showcase of artworks by seven representative artists and artist collectives, the exhibition features a restaging of iconic art spaces of the time, as well as an archival section, re-presenting the significant shifts in Hong Kong's art scene during the era.

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A Taste for Life: The Collection and Connoisseurship of Mr Low Chuck-tiew
Place: Hong Kong Museum of Art - Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, 10 Salisbury Road, Hong Kong
Date: Apr 02, 2021 to Jul 31, 2021
Detail: Xubaizhai houses a highly acclaimed collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy compiled by the late connoisseur Mr Low Chuck-tiew. Showcasing more than 40 representative works, this exhibition takes a look at the aesthetic tastes and expertise of the collector, and shares the personal stories behind his acquisition of these outstanding works, taking us on his journey of art connoisseurship.

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The Way We Eat
Place: Art Gallery of NSW - Sydney, Art Gallery Road, Australia
Date: Apr 03, 2021 to Apr 03, 2022
Detail: The Way We Eat brings together works of art related to food – that ancient source of inspiration, pleasure and anxiety. It considers what we eat; how food is made, stored and consumed; the evolution of culinary wares; cultural exchange; and the ritual and symbolic meanings associated with food.

Combining historical treasures with dramatic contemporary artworks, the exhibition is drawn from the Gallery’s extensive Asian art collection and loans from private collections.

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Ink City
Place: JC Contemporary, Tai Kwun - Hong Kong, 10 Hollywood Road, Central, Hong Kong
Date: Apr 23, 2021 to Aug 01, 2021
Detail: INK CITY sets out an expanded vision of ink art firmly grounded in current social, political, and aesthetic concerns, featuring artists inspired by immediate encounters with contemporary life. Often caught between an overwhelming urbanism and intimate brushes with everyday life, the artists offer keen observations, commentaries, and sometimes even deconstructions of contemporary culture and society through their artworks.

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Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys
Place: Tai Kwun Contemporary - Central, 10 Hollywood Rd, Hong Kong
Date: Apr 23, 2021 to Aug 01, 2021
Detail: Portals, Stories, and Other Journeys takes the extensive personal archive of the late Hong Kong artist Ha Bik Chuen as a starting point to explore the archive as a space of creativity and enquiry.

A self-taught sculptor and printmaker, Ha left behind a vast personal archive—his “thinking studio.” He documented exhibitions that he attended from the 1960s till the 2000s, and kept records in the form of ephemera, negatives, contact sheets, and photo albums. He also collected printed matter like illustrated magazines, and created book collages from these publications. As an autodidact, Ha’s library contained books on art and visual culture from far beyond the port city of Hong Kong.

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Wang Tuo: Empty-handed into History
Place: UCCA Center for Contemporary Art - Beijing, 798, No. 4 Jiuxianqiao Street, People's Republic Of China
Date: Jun 06, 2021 to Sep 05, 2021
Detail: Wang Tuo’s works grow from an array of filmmaking strategies and methodologies: spatiotemporal and narrative overlap, inventive restructuring of historical texts, and a gloomy, calm visual language. In his first institutional solo exhibition, UCCA presents a systematic overview of his work, including the premiere of “The Northeast Tetralogy,” a major series produced over the past four years. “The Northeast Tetralogy” stems from the artist’s in-depth field research into the history and practice of shamanistic rituals, reflecting on the history of Northeast Asia and the rupture of modernization as it played out in the region.

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Art of the South Nanling: A Selection of Guangdong Painting from the Hong Kong Museum of Art
Place: Hong Kong Museum of Art - Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon, 10 Salisbury Road, Hong Kong
Date: Jun 11, 2021 to Nov 03, 2021
Detail: This exhibition showcases over 80 works from Guangdong dating from the late Ming dynasty to the 20th century that present the historical and artistic development of painting in the Lingnan region. Paying particular attention to showing how artists from Guangdong paved the way towards the modernisation of Chinese painting by adopting both traditional and modern ideas and integrating local and foreign elements during the revolutionary era in China, the exhibition highlights the regional styles of Guangdong painting and the influence it exerted on Hong Kong's early painting movements.

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Unsettling Japanese Art
Place: Suntory Museum of Art - Minato City, Tokyo, Akasaka, 9 Chome−7−4, Japan
Date: Jul 14, 2021 to Aug 29, 2021
Detail: Have you ever gone to an exhibition to see the works, worked hard at reading the captions, and ended up with no sense of the works themselves? That’s a classic “the eye is blind if the mind is absent” experience.

In this exhibition, displays that stir and unsettle the heart will engage the eye, mind, and heart and boost the feeling of “I want to see this work!” For everyone standing on the starting line of the art appreciation experience, this exhibition offers a preliminary workout towards actively perceiving and understanding works, from famous works in the Suntory Museum of Art’s collection to rarities and hidden treasures.

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Fairs

Europe & Africa

USA & Canada | Asia

TEFAF Maastricht
Place: MECC Maastricht - Maastricht, Forum 100, Netherlands
Date: Sep 11, 2021 to Sep 19, 2021
Detail: TEFAF Maastricht is widely regarded as the world’s premier fair for fine art, antiques and design. Featuring over 275 prestigious dealers from 20 countries, TEFAF Maastricht is a showcase for the finest art works currently on the market.

Alongside the traditional areas of Old Master paintings, antiques and classical antiquities that cover approximately half of the fair, you can also find modern and contemporary art, photography, jewellery, 20th century design and works on paper.

TEFAF Maastricht 2021 will run from September 11th, 2021 to September 19th, 2021 with an Early Access Day on September 9th and a Preview Day on September 10th.

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Auctions

USA & Canada

Europe & Africa | Asia

Important Asian Art
Place: Revere Auctions - St. Paul, 755 Prior Ave N, Unit 235 C, Minnesota, USA
Date: Sep 09, 2021
Detail: A sale featuring a selection of fine art, decorative art, and Asian art pieces

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Fine Japanese Prints & Other Works of Art
Place: Revere Auctions - St. Paul, 755 Prior Ave N, Unit 235 C, Minnesota, USA
Date: Oct 28, 2021
Detail: A sale featuring a selection of fine art, led by a collection of exceptional Japanese ukiyo-e prints.

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Europe & Africa

USA & Canada | Asia

Fine Chinese Paintings & Works of Art
Place: Woolley & Wallis - Salisbury, 51-61 Castle Street, United Kingdom
Date: Jul 27, 2021
Detail: Tuesday 27th July 2021. Starts at 10:30am

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Japan, Korea, South East Asia
Place: Nagel Auctions - Stuttgart, Neckarstr. 189-191, Germany
Date: Oct 12, 2021
Detail: Auction Date:
October 12th 2021

Viewing:
October 8th - 11th 2021, 11 am to 5 pm

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Rugs, Carpets, Textiles, Indian & Ethnological Art
Place: Nagel Auctions - Stuttgart, Neckarstr. 189-191, Germany
Date: Oct 12, 2021
Detail: Auction Date:
October 12th 2021

Viewing:
October 8th - 11th 2021, 11 am to 5 pm

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