The recently-opened exhibition at Hong Kong’s Palace Museum, “The Origins of Chinese Civilisation”, has a serious purpose, but one suspects that most visitors focus on the objects, as well they might.
Art
Silk Roads is the accompanying publication to the current exhibition on display at the British Museum in London. Written by the Curators of the Silk Roads exhibition, Sue Brunning, Luk Yu-Ping and Elisabeth R O’Connell, this beautifully illustrated publication examines cross-cultural exchanges that occurred across Asia, Africa and Europe during 500 and 1000 CE.
Museums are not having the best press at the moment. In addition to long-running disputes over the Elgin/Parthenon Marbles and Benin Bronzes, there have a been a recent spate of “returns” of items deemed to have been looted or stolen, ranging from a 2700-year-old gold and carnelian necklace in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts from Turkey to a bevy of Khmer sculptures that had pride of place at such leading museums as the Metropolitan Cleveland Museum of Art. Although Justin M Jacobs’s recent Plunder? How Museums Got Their Treasures (with a telling question mark) deals with controversies regarding acquisitions of a more historical vintage, it is hard not to draw a line between them and these more recent developments.
Traude Gavin’s Borneo Ikat Textiles, Style Variations, Ethnicity, and Ancestry is a beautiful book replete with magnificent color plates documenting the author’s fieldwork. Gavin’s research included tracking down examples of a now defunct textile tradition, the warp ikat weaving once practiced by Ibanic-speaking ethnic groups in West Kalimantan.
For years, Andreas von Buddenbrock has been filling sketchbook after sketchbook with ink drawings that all aim to capture the places and people he comes across; from market stalls and their vendors to high rises and dilapidated buildings to lush, winding nature trails.
In 1844, a young Japanese artist named Sakurada Kyūnosuke (1823-1914) happened upon a daguerreotype, an early form of photography that had been invented in France five years earlier. Sakurada, who generally went by the name of Renjō, was at the time an apprentice in the studio of a painter of the Kanō school, a loosely organized group whose members had served for more than two centuries as the official artists of the Tokugawa regime. Renjō was astonished by the verisimilitude of the image he saw, but what shocked him was how it had been made: not with dyes and ink, but with a machine and chemical solutions. His stupefaction was such that he “broke all his brushes” and resolved henceforth to commit all his time and energy to learning photography.
The title of Women across Asian Art cannot do justice to the edited volume’s rich and varied content. Ranging over 3,000 years, the book is not only about women, but also gender. It is not limited to “art”, but takes on a more wide-ranging body of material culture and its associated disciplines, including archaeology and architecture. Geographically, it spans East and South Asia and beyond, albeit skewing sinocentric.