Sunday…
Sunday was a pretty lazy day. I decided to go to the Asian Art Museum in the afternoon, although if I was cleverer I would’ve asked around and gone to the more exciting Museum of Modern Art or de Young Museum. San Francisco certainly likes its art.
The art museum was interesting, and cheap enough at student rates, but I felt that the collection wasn’t organised well enough, and was too repetitive. Or maybe that just shows a lack of culture on my part. I think I also decided I’m not really a big fan of sculpture. And yet, as usual, I went really slowly, so the museum closed before I’d got through much of it.
One of the main feature exhibitions was interesting (but photograph-proof). It explored the influence of Asian and Western cultures on each other over a number of centuries. Without the photographs and aeroplanes of today, artists on both sides of the continental divide would draw illustrations of the other culture without having encountered it personally. The exhibition also showed phases when asian style was popular in household furniture, and showcased various cabinets and chairs that had been produced in a Chinese style by a European. Put side-by-side, Western painting style involves much more mixing of colours, while Asian styles tend to have only a small pallette of flat colours. Many Chinese pictures, both on paper and porcelain, involved only one colour (black ink on paper, or blue on porcelain), with great use of shading.
The general collection of the museum goes through numerous Asian regions and periods, showing many examples of their artwork, prominently sculpture, but also jewellery and other forms. It also gives background to many of the cultural influences, particularly religion, that play into the artistic styles and choices, and so was enlightening to someone quite ignorant of most Asian religion. A very large number of the collection (as far as I got through at least) were statues of Buddha or Hindu gods. It was interesting, for instance, to see how the depiction of Buddha differed between India and South-East Asian depictions.
Within the Chinese gallery there were also many images of Chinese calligraphy. When the elite would write out poems on large scrolls, the beauty of the poem’s words was only secondary to the beauty of its lettering. The museum correctly said that it was hard for westerners to appreciate the subtle differences between styles, although it was possible to see some different scripts and brush-strokes. One example that really excited my interest was where a calligrapher had copied out some ancient script off some pottery, giving comments on it in a more modern cursive script. The ancient Chinese characters were more clearly related to pictures of real-world objects and actually looked a lot like ancient Hebrew/Phoenecian alphabets. It’s a pity I wasn’t allowed to photograph that scroll. Oh well.
With luck, I’ll be able to catch you up on very exciting Monday and Tuesday adventures tomorrow!