Asian Art Museum

Korean art curator named Hyonjeong Kim Han, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has been named curator of Korean art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Kim, who will assume her new duties July 1, will be responsible for one of the most comprehensive overseas collections of Korean art at one of the largest Asian art museums in the Western world. At LACMA, Kim was instrumental in last year's re-installation of the Korean art galleries -- the largest such galleries outside of Korea.

Seventeen years have passed since Robert T. Singer, curator of Japanese art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, spotted an extraordinary pair of 18th century screens in an exhibition at the Kyoto University Museum of Art. Smitten with Maruyama Okyo's exquisitely detailed depiction of 17 life-size cranes on a glowing background of gold leaf, he decided that LACMA had to have the rare and valuable artwork. It took 13 years, amid many other projects, for Singer to find the owner of the privately held screens.

'Splendors of Imperial China" has arrived at the Asian Art Museum at a propitious moment, when the institution is planning a move that will raise its profile and give it a more distinct identity. The Asian Art Museum, founded in 1969 by the city and county of San Francisco and housed since then in the same building as the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park, is often thought to be a branch of the De Young.

When Timothy Potts became the director of the Getty Museum in September, he knew he was stepping into an anomaly of a job, unusual within the ranks of America's most prestigious museums. Other museum heads, bound by tight budgets, must essentially beg private collectors for donations of money and artwork. Potts, thanks to the $5.3-billion endowment of the Getty Trust, is under pressure to spend money instead of raising it. So how is his wish list for acquisitions coming? "I don't have one," said Potts, 54, in his first interview on the job. Or believe in them: "You need to be opportunistic when pursuing works of the highest quality.

As the director of the Asian Art Museum took a measure of damage to the Bay Area's art treasures Friday, he sighed at the destruction. "It's so tragic, so devastating," Rand Castile said. From the front steps of the Asian Art Museum in Golden Gate Park, he nodded at San Francisco's beloved band shell, scarred with deep cracks and crumbling pillars. "Look at our poor friend there. It took the quake pretty hard." Inside the museum, damage was far worse, and art experts scrambled to assess losses.

Five months before opening its new facility in San Francisco's civic center, the Asian Art Museum has acquired nearly 1,000 works of art as donations from two major private collections. The acquisitions, announced Wednesday, consist of 832 Japanese bamboo baskets and related works from the collection of L.A.-based Lloyd Cotsen and 167 pieces of Southeast Asian art from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, in New York.

As a young boy in Taiwan, Jerry Yang was forced to study calligraphy - writing Chinese characters with a brush. The practice is thought to mold character as well as to reflect it, but Yang found it a tedious chore. In 1998, when he was turning 30 and had already co-founded Yahoo, he heeded the call to look back to his heritage and bought two Chinese calligraphies at auction. It was the beginning, he has written, of "a journey of discovery, inspiration, and fulfillment. " Today, his collection numbers 250 works, including some by the greatest calligraphers of the Ming and Qing eras, and 40 of them have been selected for "Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy," a new exhibition at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (through Jan. 13)

The watercolor portrait of the king is not exactly subtle, but it is pretty. Amar Singh II, the ruler of the Mewar kingdom in India, fills the cloth, his coral-colored gown billowing to the edges of the painting. One hand grips a bejeweled sword, while the other delicately holds a flower toward his nose. A golden halo surrounds his feathered turban. After all, he could trace his lineage back thousands of years to the god-king Rama. The painting, from the 18th century, is an icon of power — and a fitting symbol for a new show at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

Two months after opening its new home in San Francisco's Civic Center, the Asian Art Museum has beefed up its holdings of Chinese art with a gift of 135 paintings and calligraphic works dating from the 7th century to modern times. Known as the Yeh Family Collection, the artworks were acquired over the last 150 years by several members of a Chinese family and donated by their heir, Max W. Yeh, who lives in Mendocino.

SEVEN years ago, when the Asian Art Museum was getting ready to move from its old home in Golden Gate Park to its new Civic Center location, curators found an old rug rolled up on a shelf in storage. The huge carpet was one of 7,000 objects the institution's founder, Avery Brundage, had collected, but the only information about the woolen rug that curators could find listed it as "miscellaneous office furniture."

The Cyrus Cylinder -- the famous ancient Babylonian artifact that is one of the British Museum's most prized possessions -- will come to the Getty Villa in 2013 as part of a U.S. tour to five museums. The object is expected to go on display at the Getty Villa from Oct. 2 through Dec. 2, 2013. The tour will begin in March at the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington and then proceed to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco and finally the Getty in Pacific Palisades.

As a young boy in Taiwan, Jerry Yang was forced to study calligraphy - writing Chinese characters with a brush. The practice is thought to mold character as well as to reflect it, but Yang found it a tedious chore. In 1998, when he was turning 30 and had already co-founded Yahoo, he heeded the call to look back to his heritage and bought two Chinese calligraphies at auction. It was the beginning, he has written, of "a journey of discovery, inspiration, and fulfillment. " Today, his collection numbers 250 works, including some by the greatest calligraphers of the Ming and Qing eras, and 40 of them have been selected for "Out of Character: Decoding Chinese Calligraphy," a new exhibition at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco (through Jan. 13)

The watercolor portrait of the king is not exactly subtle, but it is pretty. Amar Singh II, the ruler of the Mewar kingdom in India, fills the cloth, his coral-colored gown billowing to the edges of the painting. One hand grips a bejeweled sword, while the other delicately holds a flower toward his nose. A golden halo surrounds his feathered turban. After all, he could trace his lineage back thousands of years to the god-king Rama. The painting, from the 18th century, is an icon of power — and a fitting symbol for a new show at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

In 1930, Mexican artist Miguel Covarrubias and his wife, Rose, traveled to the island of Bali in Indonesia and promptly fell in love with what they saw. They stayed nine months, soaking up the natural beauty and distinct culture. Covarrubias later wrote a classic book called "Island of Bali," which somewhat overshadowed the art he made on the trip. One of those paintings is a stylized map of Bali, showing the diamond-shaped island dominated by smoking volcanoes towering over lush valleys and hillsides terraced into rice fields.

It's a banner year for Shanghai — the World Expo has just opened in the city, the first on Chinese soil and the most expensive and largest world's fair ever. Superlatives come naturally to Shanghai, a city that rapidly recovered its sense of mission after the downtrodden days of the Cultural Revolution. Skyscrapers pierce the sky, fashionable Western-style shopping malls abound. Of course, all this came from a legacy — a legacy of international trade and cosmopolitan sophistication that reached a peak in the 1930s.

Korean art curator named Hyonjeong Kim Han, a curator at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, has been named curator of Korean art at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. Kim, who will assume her new duties July 1, will be responsible for one of the most comprehensive overseas collections of Korean art at one of the largest Asian art museums in the Western world. At LACMA, Kim was instrumental in last year's re-installation of the Korean art galleries -- the largest such galleries outside of Korea.

It's a few days before the Asian Art Museum opens its new home and the pressure is palpable. "There's a new challenge every five minutes," says director Emily J. Sano. "You are drilling through a piece of thick Plexiglas and the drill bit breaks. You can't move a piece of art through an area because the elevator is being used for something else -- for three hours."

Seventeen years have passed since Robert T. Singer, curator of Japanese art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, spotted an extraordinary pair of 18th century screens in an exhibition at the Kyoto University Museum of Art. Smitten with Maruyama Okyo's exquisitely detailed depiction of 17 life-size cranes on a glowing background of gold leaf, he decided that LACMA had to have the rare and valuable artwork. It took 13 years, amid many other projects, for Singer to find the owner of the privately held screens.

The year is 1600. The only slings and arrows assailing Shakespeare are of the metaphorical kind. But on the other side of the globe, an unsurpassed literary master of a different stripe is strapped in samurai armor and preparing for death as his tiny band of 500 warriors faces an enemy army of 15,000. Suddenly, the looming defeat is blocked. The Japanese emperor has issued an edict stopping the battle.