The legacy of empire in Asian is palpable in Lisbon, from the images of Infant Jesus made in gold by Goan craftsmen, to the nambam lacquer screens depicting the exotic Portuguese merchants in Japan. Portugal exited Asia only in 1997 with the return of Macau to Chinese administration, but until now, Asian art in the Lusitanian capital reflected incompletely the extensive adventures of the Portuguese in Asia. After all, their merchants, mercenaries and missionaries traded, soldiered and preached in Nagasaki, Agra, Pagan, Ayudhya, Malacca, Banda and Kandy.
Art
Most people “collect” stuff, but Paul Bromberg is a “collector”, the difference being that he proceeds with intent and purpose, focusing on a relatively narrow group of objects.
The word miniature in fact comes from the Larin miniare or “to paint red”; early European miniatures—palm sized pieces that are parts of manuscripts and books facing a verse or an intense moment in a story or placed behind one—were initially delineated in that pigment. There was an Asian tradition of such painting as well, with Indian examples including illustrations in such texts such as the 12th-century Gita Govinda and 15th-century Rasa Manjari (15th century), as well as a great many Mughal examples.
Japanese woodblock prints of the 18th and 19th centuries are, one comes to realize, one of the earliest example of mass commercial art, at least purely secular art, and one that still resonates with modern sensibilities. As testament to their volume, Britain’s Victoria & Albert Museum has, quite literally, tens of thousands of prints, a collection which began with an acquisition from the 1886 Exposition Universelle in Paris and rounded out, if that’s the word, with a purchase in 1886 (“at the height of Japonisme”) of more than 12,000 from the London-based Asian art dealer, SM Franck & Sons. Fortunately, this volume, which features prints from the collection, also testifies to their aesthetics and long-lasting appeal.
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.
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.
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