Seattle Asian Art Museum

After a hiatus, I revisited the Seattle Asian Art Museum in mid April 2009.

It was quite a coup for the Museum to be able to show the "Garden and Cosmos" exhibition of paintings from the 17th through 19th centuries from the royal collections of the Maharajas of Jodhpur in Northwest India--the next venue is the British Museum)--since museums with more stellar collections of Asian Art (San Francisco, Boston, Kansas City, Cleveland, among others) were not.

My only criticism is that some of the staff--including guards and the admissions people--tend to shout and laugh. The imposing marble foyer of the Museum, with its 20' high ceiling, is like a huge echo chamber, and voices ricochet and are amplified, enough to make a din that is clearly heard in the adjacent galleries.

(What about hiring a few U.W. art history majors as guards, at least during the summer? Or in this economy, graduates?).

Some visitors, as well, seem to not realize that art is enjoyed and appreciated as a primarily visual experience--so that the volume of their conversations ought not to interfere with other visitors' experience of the art . During my visit I frequently had great difficulty hearing the highly recommended "audio tour" because of this.

Without these aural intrusions, the Seattle Asian Art Museum would be an oasis of tranquility, aesthetic pleasure, and reflection--and less like Macy's. Or the Food Circus.

Speaking of which, the placement of an espresso stand in the main courtyard, with its beautiful sandstone Hindu and Tibetan sculptures, is rather unfortunate, not to say tacky.

With admission at $5 (as a member, you get in free), this is definitely a bargain, as the special blockbuster shows at the downtown museum are $15 "a head."
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12/1/2007
Since its inception almost a decade ago in the former home of the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Asian Art Museum in Volunteer Park, on Capitol Hill, now has a permanent "berth" to display the Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Southeast Asian, and South/Central Asian (India, Pakistan, Tibet, Nepal) it could not formerly display and that remained in storage.

It has a second-tier collection of Asian Art--its Japanese Art is its strongest "suit"--compared with the Metropolitan in New York, the Nelson-Atkins in Kansas City, Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Cleveland Art Museum, the Freer/Sackler Gallery in D.C., and Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

The building itself is a very beautiful example of early 20th century Art-Deco, with classic symmetry, elegant lines, and a pale sandstone exterior. Two longitudinal wings, the northern galleries devoted to Chinese and the southern to Japanese and Korean, flank the central hall.

I recall coming here as a child and sitting on the camels outside (replicas now have replaced them) as well as viewing the bronze Ming dynasty "Thousand-Armed, Thousand-Eyes Kuanyin" (the Buddhist "goddess" of mercy) and the jade snuff bottle collection and being very astonished at the craftsmanship.

Happily, the label of the Yuan/Ming wood sculpture "Monk on the Point of Enlightenment" has been changed to delete that Zen reference, never supported by iconography .

The stunning, elegant central courtyard with its skylights still displays the Museum's Richard Fuller collection of Buddhist and Hindu art from the Indian subcontinent and Tibet/Nepal.

At least three curators of Asian Art have come and gone since its inception in the Volunteer Park, lured, I guess, to better jobs.

The Asian Art Museum, in conjunction with the volunteer Asian Art Council (composed of museum members) regularly sponsors scholarly colloquia, several of which I have attended.

Outstanding as well is the museum's location across from famed Japanese-American Isamu Noguchi's "Black Sun" sculpture standing on a large plinth with a Westerly view of Puget Sound. So while visiting the museum, one can take tour this Frederick Olmsted-designed park with its Water Tower, Botanical Conservatory, and expanses of lawn.

The suggested admission price has dropped to several dollars (it used to be $3, I recall), due to the less than anticipated attendance. The museum staff are generally very welcoming of visitors; the ubiquitous museum guards tend to speak loudly and shout into their microphones.

Asian Art can seem particularly "esoteric" and is certainly usually challenging to Westerners due to the cultural background that is needed to fully appreciate its traditions.

In recent years, the Seattle Asian Art Museum has made purchases of contemporary Asian Art, some of which are displayed in the downtown museum, in order to "reach out" to a wider popular audience.

In fact, the art works from the permanent Chinese collection in the north wing's galleries have apparently been replaced recently by a new--temporary--exhi bition of contemporary Chinese art ("Shu: Reinventing Books in Contemporary Chinese Art").

Unfortunately, at least in my view, contemporary Chinese art is not very interesting, being highly derivative--of both Western modern and contemporary art, as well as its own ancient artistic traditions.

As children, we used to come and sit on the Chinese Ming camels outside the museum (now replaced by replicas). That's been a long time (decades!).

With the to-be-built Seattle Chinese Garden, with landscaping and architecture in the style of gardens in Sichuan province (its largest city, Chongqing, is Seattle's sister city) as well as the Japanese Tea Garden in the Arboretum, Seattle now has a constellation of cultural/scenic venues that attest to its being an important player on the Pacific Rim in the ever increasing East-West dialog.

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