Asian Art Museum – San Francisco

A treasury of more than 18,000 works of art from 40 countries spanning 6,000 years of human history, the San Francisco Asian Art Museum is the largest museum of its kind in the United States and among the most important outside of Asia. Holding one of the most comprehensive collections of Asian art in the world, at any given moment approximately 2,000 individual objects representing all the major cultures of Asia are on view in galleries devoted to Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, China, the Himalayan Kingdoms and the Tibetan Buddhist World, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Laos, Malaysia, Pakistan, Persia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam. Comprised of paintings, sculptures, jades, bronzes, porcelains, furniture, textiles, arms and armor and much more, the collection is displayed in a majestic, Beaux Arts former public library in the San Francisco Civic Center repurposed into the museum by architect Gae Aulenti who also designed the transformation of Paris’s Orsay train station into the Musée d’Orsay.

Many of the finest objects in the museum’s collection were donated by Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage in the 1960s. His generosity served as the impetus for the museum’s founding and many of the celebrated works on display, including the museum’s noted gilded bronze, “Seated Buddha,” dating to 338, the oldest known dated Chinese Buddha in the world, are among the 7,700 works in the permanent collection Brundage donated over a period of two decades.

Other highlights of the collection include world-class sculptures such as the, “Standing Brahma (Bonten),” (Nara period – 710-794),  and, “Standing Indra (Taishakuten)” (Nara period – 710-794) from Japan, both lavishly inlaid with semiprecious stones, a stunning representation of the Buddhist deity, “Simhavaktra Dakini,” (Qing dynasty – 1644-1911) from China, a pair of statues of the Hindu deities, “Shiva,” and, “Parvati,” (1000-1100) from Cambodia and the monumental, “The Buddha triumphing over Mara,” (900-1000) from India.

The collection is also especially noted for its Chinese jades dating from the neolithic period to the modern era, Goryeo-dynasty (918-1342) celadons (pale sea-green porcelain and fine pottery) as well as rare unglazed stoneware from the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE–668 CE) and Unified Silla period (668–935) in Korea. The collection of Korean, “Bojagi,” or wrapping cloths, a type of folk art quilted textile is also among the finest in the world. The collection also includes a large group of rare, Chinese, Himalayan and Japanese paintings that range in style from courtly to scholarly and Buddhist to folk.

The museum also features world class temporary exhibitions, live demonstrations of traditional forms of artistic production, learning activities and workshops for both children and adults, an excellent on-site restaurant, Cafe Asia, and a gift shop full of unique art objects and a wide range of publications. The museum pursues a policy of swapping out and reinstalling examples from the permanent collection  on a twice yearly basis so even if you have visited before there is always something new and exciting to see for the first time.

 

Official Museum Site