The Asian Art Museum: Total of Artwork With a Previous, Not of the Earlier

The museum has long been making this stage. Curators have included modern and modern day paintings, ceramics and other modest and medium-scale works in some of the collection’s galleries and shown big-scale installations in floor-ground lobby locations. But these usually felt like isolated postscripts. Now, modern artwork has a larger, more integrated presence. A new 8,500-square-foot, condition-of-the-art gallery for distinctive exhibitions enables them to dedicate one particular of the existing first-floor galleries to modern commissions and acquisitions. In planning this extension, Los Angeles-centered architect

Kulapat Yantrasast

extra a rooftop art terrace scheduled to open later this thirty day period or in early September.

Two performs are now in area: “Don’t Mess With Me” and

Ai Weiwei’s

2007 “Fountain of Mild,” a glittering, glass-beaded rendition of

Vladimir Tatlin’s

spiraling 1919-20 “Monument to the 3rd International.” These will be joined by

Ala Ebtekar’s

“Luminous Floor,” a 55-foot-long expanse of handmade tiles on which the artist has printed photos from the Hubble telescope employing cyanotype, an early photographic course of action with a Prussian blue hue. From the terrace, site visitors will be ready to enter the next- and third-ground assortment galleries, stepping into a past that was at times as varied, dynamic and world as the planet in which artists do the job nowadays.

In this article the layout remains largely unchanged, with options from the museum’s 18,000 or so holdings organized in just geographic sections that have both of those chronological sequences and thematic groupings—a case of Indonesian gold jewellery, say, or a dark-walled home filled with Chinese jade carvings. Every single section also singles out one particular or two masterpieces that now have far more eye-catching and informative shows.

In the Korea segment, for case in point, an alcove lined with sheets of handmade paper reveals off the calming attractiveness of a big asymmetrical moon jar manufactured sometime among 1650 and 1750. In the South Asia gallery, a online video that traces the winding inscription on a mid-15th-century jade cup impels us to analyze the diminutive item, which traveled from Samarqand, Uzbekistan, to the court of Emperor Jahangir in India. And in the China area, a chubby, 9-inch-tall rhinoceros presides between historic bronzes, its naturalistic sort and unadorned area an anomaly amid vessels teeming with stylized animals and ornamental styles. Likely made around 1100 to 1050 B.C., it served as a ritual vessel whose possession, use and rarity element in a wall-mounted video clip and on an interactive watch.

There is no dearth of factual details through the galleries, from a who’s who of Hindu deities to the meanings of symbolic motifs and a video exhibiting how Japanese artists a lot more than 1,200 years back produced existence-sizing figures out of hollow lacquer. Only in a few circumstances, nevertheless, do curators explicitly invite us to check out aesthetic questions. A few sculptures of Vishnu built all around about the similar time (12th and 13th generations) in distinctive elements of the Indian subcontinent notify us to the prosperous variety of regional variations. And Greco-Roman elements in a screen of next- to fourth-century sculptures from Gandhara (in current-working day Pakistan) attest to an interconnected globe. But the display of the selection in general begs for far more strategies to prompt visitors to have interaction not just with the historical past or context of a work but to respect the stylistic decisions artists have designed.

Take the beautiful, temple-like tableau of a tiny gilded Buddha sitting on a throne additional than 11 ft tall, flanked by statues from Thailand and Myanmar. Produced all over 1860-80 in Myanmar, the Buddha sits in the identical earth-touching pose as a 10th-century Buddha from India a number of galleries absent, equally singled out as masterpieces. But their hands are treated incredibly differently, which is the sort of element that require not be described but, when pointed out, would make us ponder our reaction to each individual and preserve an eye out for a lot more permutations.

One of the rare situations curators notify us to a connection of this sort happens in the Japan part, exactly where a handful of paintings are offered as a kind of historic precedent to the immersive character of “Continuity,” the inaugural exhibition of the new to start with-floor gallery space. Created by Tokyo-based mostly teamLab—a collective of programmers, artists, animators and graphic designers, among others—“Continuity” takes advantage of advanced algorithms to fill flooring, ceiling and partitions with ever-changing styles primarily based on common Japanese motifs. They collide, blend and even react to our movements. The sweep of a hand below unleashes a faculty of fish, a footstep there would make a kind burst, usually slightly altering the underlying algorithm. Include to this seem and mirrored walls and it feels like you’re wandering inside of a kaleidoscope-cum-music box—pleasant, mesmerizing, enjoyable and finally closer to entertainment than artwork.

Will it attract new audiences to the museum? Most surely. And provided the museum’s history of building ingenious use of electronic systems in distinctive exhibitions, “Continuity” may well spark strategies for instruments that can help site visitors at any time more totally have interaction with the museum’s remarkable artwork.

—Ms. Lawrence writes about Asian and Islamic artwork for the Journal.