George Kuwayama

George Kuwayama arrived in Los Angeles in 1959 as a willing participant in an arranged marriage. "In those days, you didn't get a job, your professors got you a job. I didn't have anything to do with it," he said of his position as head of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's department of Far Eastern art. The system was different then. Precious few curatorial positions existed and there was no point in applying for them.

George Kuwayama arrived in Los Angeles in 1959 as a willing participant in an arranged marriage. "In those days, you didn't get a job, your professors got you a job. I didn't have anything to do with it," he said of his position as head of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's department of Far Eastern art. The system was different then. Precious few curatorial positions existed and there was no point in applying for them.

New Curator: J. Keith Wilson, associate curator of Chinese Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, has been appointed curator of the Far Eastern Art Department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Wilson, a specialist in early Chinese bronzes, jades and ceramics, will succeed George Kuwayama, who is retiring in July. During his 37-year tenure at the museum, Kuwayama has mounted more than 80 exhibitions of Asian art and organized LAMCA's Far Eastern Art Council, a 200-member support group.

News from China for the past few weeks has been so unsettling that one is hardly prepared for the exquisite calm that pervades "Imperial Taste: Chinese Ceramics From the Percival David Foundation." The rare traveling show of works from a renowned London-based collection, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Sept. 17, is about as far as one can get from the China of recent headlines.

In a multimillion-dollar move that establishes the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as a stronghold of Korean art, officials Wednesday announced the acquisition of 250 works spanning 2,000 years of Korean history. The ceramics, paintings, textiles, furniture, bronze statuary and gold jewelry are a combined sale and gift from Robert W. Moore, a Los Angeles-based collector and dealer.

"Korean Arts of the Eighteenth Century: Splendor & Simplicity"--a landmark traveling exhibition of 125 artworks, including 17 objects designated as National Treasures by the Korean government--is spending the summer at the L.A. County Museum of Art. And like most distinguished guests who settle in for an extended period, this one, which opens today, has arrived with an agenda.

"Japanese Ink Painting," an exhibition tracing the history of Sumi-e from the 15th to the early 19th centuries, opens Friday at the County Museum of Art and continues through May 12. The exhibition, the first comprehensive survey of Japanese monochrome-ink landscape paintings, contains 140 works selected from museums, universities, temples and private collections in Japan.

MOST PEOPLE WITH an omnivorous appetite for art eventually arrive at the conclusion that Euro-American humankind forgot something about making art a couple of thousand years ago. Something important. We glimpse it only fitfully in the best Western art, but we see it all the time in African and Oceanic art.

Cal State Northridge stands by the authenticity of eight Chinese artifacts donated to the university, despite doubts expressed by a retired curator and reported in the university's student newspaper, a CSUN spokesman says. Meanwhile, a Northridge jewelry manufacturer is suing the donor, his Nevada-based company and others, alleging contractual fraud in connection with the transfer of ownership of other artifacts. The objects donated to CSUN and those identified in the suit by Zalemark Inc.

Frida Kahlo's distinctive style of psychologically charged symbolic realism goes on view in an exhibition at Plaza de la Raza in Lincoln Park, Saturday through March 29. The show consists of 18 paintings and 7 drawings (from 1927 to 1945), on loan from the private collection of Dolores Olmedo Patino of Mexico City. Best known as the wife of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, Kahlo (1910-1954) gained notice for her own painting in the 1930s.