The basic guide to the Asian Art Museum's collections, now in its seventh printing

Every year, thousands of visitors flock to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the largest museum devoted exclusively to the arts of Asia in the United States. Featuring more than 18,000 artworks, the museum's world-class collection highlights the unique material, aesthetic, and intellectual achievements of Asian art and culture. This book presents two hundred and thirty exemplary works spanning both ancient and modern times. Among its many treasures, readers will find a Japanese clay jar from 3000-2000 BCE, a Chinese bronze Buddha dating to 338, a seventeenth-century Indian painting from the Shahnama (Book of Kings), a mid-twentieth-century Korean wrapping cloth, and a new Thai work made from textile, window mesh, safety pins, and amulets. A collaboration between museum curators, artists, educators, and collectors, the book also takes an in-depth look at fourteen masterpieces selected for their beauty, rarity, and historical importance. Stunning full-color photographs and new texts—including a foreword by museum director Ja Xu—offer fresh perspectives on both ancient and contemporary objects. A handsome addition to any art history collection, this volume is an essential resource for museum visitors as well as anyone interested in Asian art.

"Located in the heart of San Francisco's dynamic civic center, the Asian Art Musuem - Chong-Moon Lee Center occupies a historic beaux art building that has been transformed by architect Gene Aulenti into a showplace for one of the finest collections of Asian art in the Western world. The collection includes about 15,000 objects spanning more than 6,000 years of history and representing cultures throughout Asia."--BOOK JACKET.

A comprehensive introduction to the new Asian Art Museum in San Francisco's Civic Center

Contains more than 100 highlights of the collection, along with detailed commentaries by Kumja Paik Kim

As a 50th anniversary gift to the museum, the Society for Asian Art has commissioned a major work by Liu Jianhua, one of China's best-known contemporary installation artists. The work comprises approximately 2,500 pieces of white porcelain formed into letters of the English alphabet and components of Chinese characters, suspended from the ceiling of the second-floor loggia. The artist provides only the building blocks of words, leaving it to viewers to create meaning. The artwork's location is especially apropos: the space offers an opportunity for dialogue with the original engraved literary quotations on the loggia's walls, dating to the building's previous incarnation as San Francisco's Main Library.