Shanghai update

Whew! Our first week of installation for Shanghai is over, and week two is about to begin. All of the objects have arrived safely and the galleries are beginning to really take shape. The exhibition crew has been busy condition checking artwork, hanging paintings, dressing mannequins, and dealing with all of the assorted surprises that emerge with a project of this complexity. Here a few behind the scenes images from the past week.

A detail of the neon tube components of Shen Fan's installation "Landscape—Commemorating Huang Binhong—Small Scroll."

Shanghai sneak peek – Qipao

From behind the scenes of Shanghai, stylish qipao from the Shanghai History Museum are unpacked for condition checking. A total of five of these body-hugging garments, featuring rich fabrics and art deco inspired motifs, are included in the “High Times” section of the exhibition. First worn by fashionable women in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s, the distinctive qipao remains popular today.

A little holiday travel cheer

The holidays are upon us and that means one thing — many hours spent braving the timeless monotony of airport terminals. But for those of you flying through San Francisco International Airport this season, we’ve got a special treat for your weary eyes. You see, there is a little project that we’ve been working on behind-the-scenes.

Jades await condition checking at the San Francisco Airport Museums

Beginning the week of Christmas, the San Francisco Airport Museums (yes, the airport has a fully-accredited museum) will host The Resplendent Stone: Chinese Jades from the 18th-20th Centuries. Drawn from the Asian Art Museum’s extensive jade collection, this is the first of several exhibitions to be produced by the San Francisco Airport Museums with loans from the Asian Art Museum.
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Sneak Peek: Bali in Amsterdam

Greetings from the land of cheese and chocolate — Amsterdam. Most of our visitors probably are asking, “Why are staff from the Asian Art Museum in Amsterdam”? Well, I’m here, along with objects conservator Mark Fenn and Associate Curator of Southeast Asian Art Natasha Reichle, planning for the first ever U.S. exhibition of Balinese art.

The exhibition, Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance, will open at the museum in February 2011. But like many of our exhibitions, years of work are needed to ensure that it is a spectacular success.

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Goodbye Samurai

It’s time to send-off another wonderful exhibition. For all of us, the fourteen week run of Lords of the Samurai has felt remarkably short. Compared to the years of work that go into organizing an exhibition of this scale, and the centuries of history represented by the works within, these few weeks are but an instant.

Objects wait for a final condition check before packing

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Countdown to Emerald Cities

Putting together a major art exhibition is not a quick process, with the planning for most shows starting years in advance. But no matter how ahead we begin work, the final two months before an exhibition opens will always be crunch time.

Emerald Cities does not debut until October 23, but its installation is complicated by the concurrent deinstallation of Lords of the Samuari (ending September 20). This is not atypical — we try and keep the turn around time (or “dark time”) between exhibitions as short as possible. Since these two exhibitions share many of the same behind-the-scenes staff, the result is a whole lot of people running around with brains and workspaces messily split between Japan and Southeast Asia.

So here are a few pics of this ongoing mayhem, as museum staff work to complete as much Emerald Cities prep as possible before jumping into packing up Lords of the Samurai.

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The Museum of Asian Puppetry

Within the registration department, we sometimes like to joke that we are really the Museum of Asian Puppetry. With boxes and boxes of puppets lining our art storage areas, it certainly seems that way! Altogether, the museum owns close to 500 puppets and related theatrical arts. Almost half of these are Indonesian rod puppets (wayang golek) from The Mimi and John Herbert Collection (a rotating selection from this collection is permanently on view in our Southeast Asia gallery). In addition, the collection includes numerous puppets from China, Thailand, and Burma.

Given this notable collection, we were recently thrilled to be offered a full set of Javanese shadow puppets that have been tucked away in their original traveling trunk since before World War II. Now we normally don’t showcase new gifts until they have completed our lengthy and deliberate acquisitions process (a topic for another post some day), but because it will be a long time before we finish processing this gift and because they are just that cool, I thought a sneak peek might be in order.

This vast layer of shadow puppets is only the second of seven layers tightly packed into this trunk.

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Lords of the Samurai, Round 2

With our presentation of Lords of the Samurai approaching the halfway point, museum staff are busy preparing for a complex rotation in which nearly sixty objects will be removed from the galleries and replaced with a second selection of artwork.  This weekend will be the last chance to see the full first set of objects before this process begins. (The remaining fifty or so objects currently on view—including the six suits of armor and all of the sword blades—will stay on view for the entire exhibition).

Just as with our regular gallery rotations, we rotate objects because they are light-sensitive. The list of sensitive objects includes paintings, textiles, lacquers, and most other objects composed of organic materials. However, a mid-point special exhibition rotation differs slightly from our permanent gallery rotations because the new objects have to fit into the existing thematic content and flow of the exhibition. With so many unique works on view, this can make object selection a little bit tricky.

Portrait of Hosokawa Shigekata (left) will be replaced with a Portrait of Hosokowa Tsunatoshi (right). When possible, we try and rotate objects of similar type, function, and subject. © Eisei Bunko, Japan.

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Rotations make the museum go ’round

Ever since the doors to Lords of the Samauri opened, us behind-the-scene folk have received a lot of questions about what we’re working on now. As much as we would like to, we’re not just hanging around the gallery enjoying the show. At any one time, multiple exhibitions are in various stages of production, not to mention ongoing work with new acquisitions, loans, and the care of objects in storage. But at this particular moment what we’re really gearing up for is the rotation season.

“Rotation” has a pretty specific meaning here at the Asian Art Museum. It refers to the process of periodically removing all light-sensitive works from the permanent galleries and replacing them with fresh works from storage. Rotations occur approximately every 8 months and can involve switching up to 10% of the works currently on view. This particular rotation season is extra busy as we will also be rotating our two current exhibitions, Photographic Memories and Lords of the Samurai, for a total rotation of around 280 objects.

Framed prints wait to go on view in the upcoming Chinese gallery rotation

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A final peek behind the scenes

Lords of the Samurai officially opens today and already the ground floor buzz is strong. For those of us who work on bringing together exhibitions, it is always a little strange to walk into the galleries that we have spent weeks sequestered in and to find them full of crowds, conversation, and fearless children staring down suits of armor. Always the objects look a little bit different — like they were not fully alive until that first visitor walks through the door.

As we begin to move on to an assortment of other projects that have been patiently waiting in the wings, I thought I’d wrap-up our Samurai Behind-The-Scenes series  with a few photos that never quite made it to the blog, featuring a (very) small part of the incredible team of museum staff and distinguished visitors who helped make this show happen. Enjoy!

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