China Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868-1872

Saturday, February 16, 2013 - Sunday, May 05, 2013

Experience the vanished world of Imperial China vividly captured on glass plates in China Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868–1872, the first exhibition devoted solely to images of China taken by the Scottish photographer that startlingly reveal the character of the vast empire.

Born in Edinburgh two years before the invention of the daguerreotype and the birth of photography, Thomson first traveled to Asia in 1862, where he set up a professional photographic studio. Fascinated by local cultures, Thomson returned in 1868 and settled in Hong Kong. Over the next four years, he made extensive trips to Guangdong, Fujian, Beijing, China’s northeast, and down the great river Yangzi. This exhibition is drawn from his time in these regions.

These were the early days of photography, when negatives were made on glass plates that had to be coated with emulsion before exposure. A cumbersome amount of equipment was required, but with perseverance and energy Thomson captured a wide variety of images: landscapes, people, architecture, and domestic and street scenes. As a foreigner, his ability to gain access to photograph women was particularly remarkable.

Thomson’s excellent work in China established him as a serious pioneer of photojournalism and one of the most influential photographers of his generation.

After returning to Britain, Thomson took up an active role informing the public about China through illustrated lectures and publications. In 1920 he wrote to Henry Wellcome—pharmacist, philanthropist, and collector—offering to sell his glass negatives. Thomson died before the transaction could be completed, and Wellcome bought the negatives from Thomson’s heirs in 1921. All images in the exhibition are from the Wellcome Library’s collection in London.

This exhibition seeks to show the great diversity of the photographs Thomson took in China. What marked his work as special (portraits of the rich and famous aside) was the desire to present a faithful account of China and its people. Thomson wanted his audience to see the human aspects of life in China through his extensive record of everyday street scenes, rarely captured by other photographers of that era.

China Through the Lens of John Thomson 1868–1872 has been organized by Betty Yao MBE, Credential International Arts Management.

Qualities of Jade

Tuesday, November 22, 2011 - Sunday, February 17, 2013

Jade is more than a stone; it is an ideal.  Some 2,500 years ago, Confucius (Kong Qiu or Kongzi, 551-479 B.C.) provided a list of likenesses between particular sensual qualities of carved jades such as luster, surface angularity, and veining patterns and qualities of perfected human character such as benevolence, loyalty, and virtue.  Confucius elaborated his meaning in a passage from the Book of Rites:

Anciently, superior men found the likeness of all excellent qualities in jade.
Soft smooth and glossy, it appeared to them like benevolence.
Fine, compact, and strong—like intelligence.
Angular, but not sharp and cutting—like righteousness.
Hanging down (in beads) as if it would fall to the ground like (the humility of) propriety.
When struck, yielding a note, clear and prolonged, yet terminating abruptly—like music. 
Its flaws not concealing its beauty, nor its beauty concealing its flaws—like loyalty.
With an internal radiance issuing from it on every side—like good faith.
Bright as a brilliant rainbow—like heaven.
Exquisite and mysterious, appearing in the hills and streams—like the earth.
Standing out conspicuous in the symbols of rank—like virtue.
Esteemed by all under the sky—like the path of truth and duty. 

On the Silk Road and the High Seas: Chinese Ceramics, Culture and Commerce

Saturday, September 01, 2012 - Sunday, January 27, 2013

On the Silk Road and the High Seas: Chinese Ceramics, Culture and Commerce examines why Chinese ceramics were such prized commodities, both at home and abroad. Examples of proto-porcelain appeared in China about 3,000 years ago and hard-paste porcelain began to be made around 1,800 years ago. This precious product was sometimes called “white gold,” especially in the West. Foreign trade and changing domestic markets played a role in stimulating Chinese potters to continually reinvent their repertoire of shapes and decorative techniques. These exchanges also illuminate important episodes in cultural history.
 
The earliest era of Chinese trade with lands to the west began over 2,000 years ago. Before there was a Silk Road, Chinese records refer to a Jade Road where traders from the East and West met at the oasis of Khotan in Central Asia.  There the Chinese acquired the type of gemstone they valued most. From the 1st through the 14th century overland and maritime exchanges of ideas and goods between China, the Mediterranean world, Japan, and Central and Southeast Asia were never controlled by a single political power. The overland road for much of its length was a fragile chain stretched across inhospitable desert and mountain terrain. Ships sailed unpredictable seas from one small city-state to another. Many were swept off course and sank, such as two recently discovered cargos of 9th- and 14th-century Chinese ceramics.
 
During the 18th century a flourishing shipping business, known as the “China Trade,” developed between Western nations and the Chinese port of Canton in the upper reaches of the Pearl River Delta. Trade concentrated on tea, silk, and inexpensive porcelain. “Fancy” goods and special orders, like the armorial porcelain and large decorative pieces—particularly punch bowls—were privately traded by ships’ officers. At this time, the European porcelain industry was in its infancy and production of large pieces of porcelain was problematic there.

Throughout history, the exchange of goods and ideas was never one-sided. Novel ideas from the West fascinated the emperors of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) inspiring the creation of imperial wares, such as the pattern known in the West as mille-fleur and in China as wanhuajin. Jesuits working in Chinese imperial workshops were a conduit for European imagery and thoughts, such as the mille-fleur design often depicted in easily transportable 18th-century European engravings. The Chinese version of the mille-fleur motif found favor as a pattern on Yongzheng imperial porcelain (1723–1735) and continues to be admired in China to this day.  On such wares, flowers of the four seasons miraculously bloom at the same time. One reason for the appeal of this design is its association with a pre-existing Chinese proverb foretelling prosperity: “May one hundred flowers bloom.” Comprised of over 60 objects, On the Silk Road and the High Seas: Chinese Ceramics, Culture and Commerce explores these and other tales, revealing why Chinese ceramics were so desirable at home and abroad. 

On the Silk Road and the High Seas: Chinese Ceramics, Culture and Commerce was organized by the Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida.
 

SUBLIME LANDSCAPES: PHOTOGRAPHS OF ASIA BY DR. DILIP RAVAL

Saturday, May 19, 2012 - Sunday, August 12, 2012

Dilip Raval belongs to the tradition of legendary American landscape photographers that includes Ansel Adams, Brett Weston, Elliot Porter, and John Sexton. His subject, however, is landscapes of Asia. The photographs in this exhibition were taken on repeated visits to Raval’s homeland of India and during travel to Nepal, Bhutan, Japan, Indonesia, and China. The elements are vibrant and present, and the images evoke awe, respect, and deep personal and human identity with the natural world.

Many of Raval’s compositions are grand and symphonic. They are simultaneously far-reaching and precise, resolving form, light, color, shape, pattern, and prospect in a deeply satisfying and delicate harmony. Using the selective eye in the camera together with the manipulative potential of digital printmaking, the artist brings vast panoramas and close observations into the same frame. Movements of shape—layered mountains, deep valleys, terraced hillsides, leaves on a branch—and melodies of light and color draw the viewer through landscape toward a contemplative reverie that stops short of both nostalgia and cliché.

At first glance, the images appeal to an instinctive love of beauty, but like the sublime tradition to which they more properly belong, they also bring into question the preservation of the individual and of the natural order on which he depends, a quietly insistent fear that nothing so beautiful can endure. As John Sexton, a mentor to Raval, writes in his eloquent and sensitive introduction to the catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, Sublime Landscapes: Photographs of Asia by Dr. Dilip Raval:

Fabled Journeys in Asian Art: East Asia

Saturday, July 16, 2011 - Sunday, August 05, 2012

This summer, the exhibition Fabled Journeys in Asian Art will expand to include East Asia. Viewed as a companion exhibition to Fabled Journeys in Asian Art: South and Southeast Asia, which opened in January 2011 in Gallery 3, the East Asian complement draws on works of art from the Crow Collection with distinctive literary and cultural terrain.

The first section of the East Asian portion of the exhibition presents selected paintings, carved jades, and porcelain sculpture inspired by Taoism, which developed in China. Another focus of the exhibition is journeys figured in images of women—with their own expressed balances of yin and yang. The third section of the exhibition features large ceramic horses and camels made for journeys into the afterlife in burial tombs. They are emblems of China’s “this-worldly” expansion into Central and western Asia during the Han and Tang dynasties along roads that came to be known as “the Silk Route.”
 
Looking farther east, the last section of the exhibition is an array of objects touching on the transmission of Buddhism to Japan, the transportation and exploitation of ivory for finely carved objects, and the search in Japanese ports by Western traders for porcelains that delivered the qualities of form, color, and translucency prized in Asian ceramics, ivories, and jades.
 
A journey is a compelling metaphor that has perhaps lost some of its caché in our time of high-speed travel and instant communication; however, whether swift or slow; internal or external; linear, ambling, or circular, a journey is a dynamic undertaking that addresses change, among the most persistent and puzzling qualities of our experience of ourselves and the world.

Fabled Journeys in Asian Art: South and Southeast Asia

Saturday, January 01, 2011 - Sunday, July 29, 2012

This winter, the museum offers up Fabled Journeys in Asian Art, drawn from the Crow Collection.  In works of art from all around Asia--paintings, fans, sculpture, carvings for the hand, furniture for the desk--rocks, jades, crystals, and corals-- journeys of many kinds are traced.  Wide rivers are crossed on a reed, deep caves explored in the whitest jade; cities visited under golden clouds.  Love is found on a mountaintop, babies are borne aloft in baskets, avatars descend to combat unrighteousness, pilgrims abandon home for a blessing, minds turn within to combat error. Journeys, it is acknowledged, bring change; follow some well-worn paths in fabled journeys from the cultures of Asia, and pave a road of your own.

DAVID GIBSON: TOWARD KASUGA SHRINE ALONG PATHWAYS OF LANTERNS

Saturday, February 25, 2012 - Saturday, May 05, 2012

DAVID GIBSON DESCRIBES HIS APPROACH to the important Shinto-Buddhist shrine Kasuga Taisha in Nara as he first experienced it in 2005: “Kasuga Shrine is located at the far end of Nara Park. On the walk through Nara Park, one encounters a forest with inviting paths. The ascent toward Kasuga Grand Shrine begins along these paths. The paths merge into an avenue that reveals the first glimpses of ancient stone lanterns; only a few at first, then more and more as one draws nearer to the shrine. Over the centuries moss and lichen have covered the lanterns, creating a patina reflecting their age. Remnants of paper are attached to the stone lantern windows. These fragile papers, with prayers written in calligraphy, linger year-round from festivals when all 3,000 lanterns are illuminated by candles, keeping a centuries-old tradition alive. These visual and historic elements offer a transporting and a calming experience. Kasuga Grand Shrine is a place of refuge and contemplation.”

In 2008 he returned to the location: “Again the shrine offered a feeling of quiet and reflection as I walked along the paths during the early morning. It was the same harmony I felt when I first discovered the shrine. During this visit, the light mist and patches of morning fog were perfect conditions for photography. The Kasuga Shrine photographs are my interpretation of a remarkable place and reflect my respect for the culture that created these sacred sites.”

Gibson’s description introduces a series of photographs from which a selection has been made for this exhibition. Their sequence follows the order of pathway to the shrine, first built in the 8th century to house tutelary and ancestral deities of the powerful Fujiwara clan. The approach, shaded by a towering forest, induces a process of purification, important in all Shinto ritual. The mind dispels clutter and settles into peacefulness, from which awareness heightens.

The lanterns on the approach to Kasuga Shrine were offered over centuries by the faithful, who kept them illuminated. Now the lanterns are lit only at the onset of spring at the time of Setsubun, or “The Bean Throwing Festival,” and again during the Obon Festival, when ancestors return to visit the living.

The pathway along the lanterns is a place of clarity and memory, intimated we hope by your experience of this exhibition.

Quotes are from David Gibson, Kasuga Shrine, 2010, limited edition, published by the artist.

WORD SPIRIT: CALLIGRAPHY, PAINTINGS, AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHACO TERADA

Saturday, February 25, 2012 - Saturday, May 05, 2012

CHACO TERADA CHOSE KOTODAMA—a compound of koto (meaning “word” or “speech”) and tama (meaning “spirit” or “soul”)—for the title of the small retrospective of her work over the past decade on view this spring at the Crow Collection of Asian Art. The words embody an ancient Japanese belief that spiritual power lives in language. In Japanese martial arts, belief in kotodama gives rise to the kiai, or “battle cry,” in aikido; language power is called upon to harmonize mind and body to the task at hand. This alignment of force and technique is also referred to as a “spirit meeting.”

Terada, living in a culture where English is the common tongue, experiences the sensation of kotodama—the spiritual power of words—in calligraphy, where she comes back to the language of her heart. From calligraphy, she has extended this power to other art forms using photography and ink and color on paper and silk. For Terada, kotodama is the feeling that guides her brush, harmonizing body, spirit, and action.

Terada learned calligraphy sitting next to her father, a distinguished Japanese calligrapher. He did not teach her with words but in silence. He instructed her to watch his gestures, to sense speed and hesitation, to feel pressure on the paper or the lift of the brush, and to follow the forms with her own tama, or “qi,” flowing into the brush. He taught her the art of calligraphy by movement of spirit, by issuing the sound of spirit in action. Terada’s own calligraphy, represented in the exhibition by Exercise I, is accomplished and spirited, and it remains her understanding of art,    although her media have assumed new roles.

Wanting to explore possibilities of ink, paper, and silk, she moved from calligraphy to couching ink-strokes between layers of silk and paper, revealing the gesture through translucent materials—like thoughts recalled from memory, feelings tinted in another place of awareness. In another group of works on view, she focuses on the character itself, feeling its interaction with space, its flight into being, its lifespan as gesture as limited and unique, a lifespan like our own. One group of photographs follows the trajectory of words written on tightly folded paper as the tension of the folds is released and the paper springs to life to permeate space in dizzying spirals and wacky conversations. In the most recent group of works, she reenacts the horizon between water and sky through layers of silk over ink—sky never quite begins, sea never quite ends.

As in a martial art or calligraphy, Terada's intense concentration and discipline can arm her with powerful lightness, single-pointed intimacy, and harmony. Her works are small, her tools few. They catch us by surprise. We lean in to join the "spirit meeting."

Qiu Anxiong: Animated Narratives

Saturday, October 15, 2011 - Sunday, February 05, 2012

This exhibition of work by emerging Shanghai-based artist Qiu Anxiong includes paintings and video art. Qiu's unique videos are created by a stop-motion animation technique from images of his paintings. Together the paintings and videos in this exhibition offer insight into Qiu's process: how he creates an image in paint, how it evolves and is recorded, and its final result in video as part of an ever-changing series of images. The result is hauntingly beautiful moving images that range from mythical stories to urban transformation.

Although the paintings are acrylic on canvas, they appear at first glance to be ink paintings. The landscape images in particular refer to traditional Chinese landscape scroll paintings, with their craggy mountains and still lakes. In some of his videos, Qiu shows the transformation of an idyllic natural landscape to one that is polluted, industrialized, and urban.

Qiu came to international prominence when his work was shown in the 2006 Shanghai Biennial. With a video titled New book of the Mountains and Seas, 2006, he was able to capture an approach to tradition in China at a time when few artists were considering the subject. He writes: "These days, most people consider new and old to be mutually exclusive concepts. The new is completely novel; the old, totally outdated....No one has really thought deeply enough about the intimate relationship between the new and the old. Most people in China automatically equate new with all things Western."  One can argue that Qiu's art, through both his chosen medium and subjects, sets out to question prevailing assumptions about tradition and change in Chinese society.

Qiu Anxiong was born in 1976 in Sichuan Province, where he studied at the Sichuan Art Academy until 1994. After completing further study in Kassel, Germany, he returned to China to settle in Shanghai. He has shown his work internationally, including in contemporary art biennials in Sydney, Thessaloniki, Seoul, Sáo Paulo, Busan, and Nanjing.

Dream Chamber: Chinese Bedroom Furniture from the 17th to 19th Century

Saturday, June 18, 2011 - Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Ming and Qing elite did not go to bed in public, like their counterparts in France. There was no royal leveé or couchée, with courtiers ceremonially in attendance. In upper-class China, places of sleeping and beds were private spaces for slumber, frolicking, and reproductive get-togethers. The very privacy and focus of the bedroom makes it a charged spot for dramatic action in Chinese novels and operas, such as The Golden Lotus or The Plum in the Golden Vase (Jin Ping Mei), Tale of the Western Chamber (Xi Xiang Ji), and Dream of the Red Chamber (Hong Lou Meng), also known as “Story of the Stone”

Inventories of the late Ming and Qing periods reveal that beds were among the most important possessions in a household, particularly for a woman. A bed might be given to a woman by her family as part of her dowry or by her husband as an indication of her status among multiple wives and concubines. Should a marriage be terminated, a woman’s bed and her jewelry remained her own.

The bed we see here is without the colorful dressings that would have accompanied it in use. It would have had curtains all around, able to conceal anyone within from view, sashes for exposing or concealing the interior as desired, perhaps tassels hanging from the canopy, and comfortable silk covers and cushions.  

This small exhibition features examples of hardwood furniture that might comprise a bed chamber in the home of a prosperous family living at the end of Ming dynasty in the 17th century or under the Qing dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries. It includes a canopy bed with ornamental pieced-wood railings, a footstool, a wash-basin, and two small fan-shaped stools that could serve multiple functions. A bed chamber might contain in addition, a lamp, an incense stand, a small chest, and a few favorite items for display. And, of course, the dreams of its occupant.

Tradition Transformed: Tibetan Artists Respond

Saturday, May 21, 2011 - Sunday, September 11, 2011

Tibet is a place contested in contemporary imagination as well as politics.  Gone are illusions of Tibet as Shangri-la, described by James Hilton in his novel of 1933--a utopian society cut off from the rest of the world and little touched by the corrosion of time.  New illusions of a secular modern society that retains its distinctive Tibetan culture have arisen in the Autonomous Region of Tibet (TAR), part of the Peoples’ Republic of China.  

Tradition Transformed offers vantages on this rapidly changing ground from eight artists with ties to traditional Tibetan painting.  Four of the artists were born in Tibet, three in neighboring Nepal, and one in India.  Only two  among them currently reside in Tibet.  All locate their artistic challenge and response both within the Tibetan tradition and on a world stage.

The more than twenty works of art exhibited bring features of traditional Tibetan art into view even as they are questioned, claimed, and transformed by contemporary artists:  religion as artistic stimulus;  training in methods and styles particular to a workshop and master; water based pigments and earth and mineral colors; particular formats and imagery.  Some artists use the traditional ground mineral pigments; one makes use of beer cans, another stickers. The eldest among them was born in 1961, the youngest, in 1981.    

They serve, as artists often do in times of cultural upheaval, as agents of transformation and mirrors of change.

The exhibition was organized by the Rubin Museum of Art (RMA) in New York City, and curated by Rachel Weingeist.   RMA  opened in 2004 to focus on historical art of the Himalayas—a rich and relatively unexplored dimension of Asian culture, producing art for Buddhist and Bon patrons in the form of murals, paintings, sculptures, ritual objects, and manuscripts, along with an extensive literary tradition.  Tradition Transformed is the first foray by RMA into contemporary Tibetan art, and recognition of the continuing distinctive imprint of a long tradition.   For a wider public less familiar with traditional Himalayan art,  this focus is instructive not only in showcasing active agents of transformation in the present, but also as a point of  departure in either temporal direction—into the past or towards the future of Himalayan culture.

The artists represented in Tradition Transformed in Dallas are Dedron, born in 1976; Gonkar Gyatso, born in 1961  Losang Gyatso, born in 1953, Kesang Lamdark, born in 1963;  Tenzin Norbu, born in 1971; Tenzing Rigdol born in 1982,  TsherinSherpa, born in 1968,  and Penba Wangdu, 1969.

Motion Pictures: A Handful of Drawings by Katsushika Hokusai

Saturday, February 12, 2011 - Sunday, August 28, 2011

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849), a Japanese painter, book illustrator, and designer of woodblock prints in Edo (modern Tokyo), excelled in depicting motion. He is best known for his iconic Great Wave off Kanagawa, from the series of color woodblock prints Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, ca. 1820. The great wave roils toward circularity, enclosing the fishermen within chambers of its self-repeating forms. Small C-shaped fingers of water are thrown forward of the great curve as it arcs to its thunderous completion. Few pictures so successfully depict the fluid dynamics of the ocean or induce such terror among the unseaworthy. Great Wave off Kanagawa inspired the botanical design in Snuff Bottle Court at the Crow Collection.

Hokusai also made thousands of studies of human figures in motion, some collected by his students and published among other drawings as manga, or “whimsical pictures.” This small display of drawings of the human figure provides a hint of Hokusai’s ability to suggest not simply movement caught in a frame but movement that continues in time. How does he do it? Visit the exhibition and explore this question in drawings of mounted warriors, dancing misfits, and scribbling courtesans. Hokusai wished for a lifetime of one hundred years so that he might achieve some understanding of making pictures, and he dedicated himself to the task from the age of six to his death at eighty-nine.

Mighty Meiji Metals: Sculpture from 19th Century Japan

Saturday, August 28, 2010 - Sunday, June 12, 2011

In 1867 an alliance of Japanese warlords staged a coup d’etat.  In a time of flourishing urban populations and the real power of the merchant class, they recognized the weakness in their antiquated feudal government and feared potential aggression by foreign powers.  Committed to reform, they ousted the Tokugawa Shogun, and returned central authority to the Imperial line. The young emperor, only 15, and living in relative poverty in Kyoto was moved to Edo, and the city was renamed Tokyo to mark the new era.  Backed by a powerful oligarchy, the emperor set a course for Japan as a modern industrialized nation state on an international stage. The emperor called his new reign period, 1868-1911, Meiji (Enlightened Government.) 

The confidence of Japan’s new nationalistic identity in the Meiji era is displayed in this small exhibition of outstanding works of art drawn from the Crow Collection: three imposing bronze sculptures over four feet in height, a dramatic carved and lacquered wood screen ornamented with precious metals, and ceramics and enamelware draped in liquid gold.

Meiji style aims for sensational effects: pictorial themes, drawn from Japanese history and mythology (with links to China) are vivified with realism and hyper-detail. Casting techniques are complex and daring.  Ceramics flush with color and gold.  An association of Japanese art with patience and consummate skill is firmly imprinted. 

Five Colors: Chinese Cloisonne Vessels on Loan from the Mandel Family Collection

Saturday, August 28, 2010 - Sunday, June 12, 2011

A dozen monumental cloisonné vessels that fit the imperial model made during the Ming (1368-1644) and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties are on view in the exhibition Five Colors:  Chinese Cloisonné Vessels on Loan from a the Mandel Collection.

Cloisonné is a process of inserting colored enamel pastes into a network of cells, or “cloisons” that rise above a metal ground.  The cells are formed by bending wire, usually copper, and soldering it to a metal surface, usually bronze or copper.  Enamel paste is made by tinting glass with metal oxides and grinding it to a paste. The decorated object is then fired at a low temperature in a “muffle” kiln, and the enamel fuses to the body without loss of placement or color. Gold liberally applied to designs creates even more brilliance. Take a Connoisseur’s Checklist provided in the galleries along with you as you view the exhibition and judge the quality of these works for yourself. 

In cases adjacent to the large cloisonné vessels on long-term loan to the Crow Collection, an instructive array of objects from the Collection is assembled to demonstrate various uses of enamel in the Chinese decorative arts.  Here you will find enamel as coloration for a porcelain monochrome; in pictures and patterns painted on ceramics--under and over the glaze; as inlay into metal, and in designs painted on metal in imitation of more costly cloisonné and enamel techniques.

Soaring Voices: Recent Ceramics by Women from Japan

Saturday, January 22, 2011 - Sunday, May 08, 2011

Women have been central to the Japanese ceramics tradition over its long history—the longest known among human civilizations.  Jomon or “cord-marked” pots were being made in Japan by women in 14,000 bce, some four thousand years before pottery traditions began in Mesopotamia and China.  In the 6^th century, when the potter’s wheel came to Japan from Korea, along with other technologies for producing thinner, more durable, less water-permeable ceramics—-men assumed the lead role in producing these wheel-thrown wares fired at high temperatures in specially designed kilns.  Women and their hand-worked, unfired, earthenware ceramics were relegated to the background, but by no means to extinction.

With expanded industrialization of the ceramics in the Meiji period, (1868-1911), and an increase in foreign demand, many Japanese feared loss of basic qualities of Japanese ceramics.  A movement at the turn of the 20^th century refocused aesthetic interest in traditional craft and reaffirmed the value of the ceramicist’s hand.  This reinvigoration of craft combined with international emergence of “the individual” as the source of artistic creativity has created a place that individual women artists occupy alongside men. 

The works in the exhibition span categories such as “traditional,” “sculptural,”  “craft design,” and “installation;” and like much contemporary art, they often float above such boundaries.  Inspiration for shapes, colors, and motifs is acknowledged by these artists to come from plants, shells, mountains, rivers, rubbish, industrial design, light and shadow, absence and presence.  

Despite the communality of being women and born into Japanese culture, these artists emerge in their work as creators and innovators with individual sensibilities, wit, and unique responses to a wide range of artistic traditions.  This exhibition comes together as a stimulating encounter with twenty-five distinctive and highly creative artistic personalities.

Soaring Voices was developed by The Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shiga Prefecture, and hus-10, Inc., Tokyo, Japan and organized for tour by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC.  The exhibition was generously supported in part by the E. Rhodes & Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and the S&R Foundation.

Thousand Names of Vishnu

Saturday, May 01, 2010 - Sunday, February 27, 2011

Names, like images, are limits and boundaries. But the utterance of one thousand names approaches an infinity of sound and meaning, as is surmised from viewing the One Thousand Names of the Hindu god Vishnu (Vishnu Sahasranama) translated from Sanskrit and inscribed on the windows of the Skybridge. The names, accruing to the Vishnu story over many generations, were passed on in poetic form as part of the Indian epic, the Mahabharata, compiled between 300 bce to 300 ce.  (There are traditional grouping of one thousand names for other Hindu deities as well.) 

 Many devotees of Vishnu recite his “Thousand Names” daily from memory.  Each name calls up an aspect of the god, a quality, a story. The names are organized into 107 verses, with internal rhyme and meter.  Name sequences seem to range all over the map.  In some places they line up like an orderly family of sound and meaning; elsewhere they abut as contradictions or take off in an entirely new direction.  Some sequences unfold with the logic of rap music, others exhale like a lullaby.  The god, it is understood, exceeds them all. 

This exhibition covers the windows of the Sky Bridge leading into the Indian Gallery.

Tibet: The Land Closest to the Sky, Photography by Marc Riboud

Saturday, October 02, 2010 - Sunday, January 30, 2011

The Crow Collection presents Tibet- The Land Closest to the Sky,  Photographs by Marc Riboud, the first solo exhibition in Texas of one of photography’s most original and influential masters. Curated by Selina Ting, the exhibition presents Marc Riboud’s work in Tibet- photographs in color and black and white taken in 1985. More than two thirds of the photographs are previously unknown to the public. Also included is a collection of personal souvenirs and objects such as the photographer’s Leica camera, letters from his mentor Henri Cartier-Bresson, souvenirs from travelling, and more.

It was the passion to see and to photograph small pieces of the world that brought Marc Riboud to Tibet, and not to testify. Riboud has never claimed to exert any social role or seek any truth. In his words, “photography cannot change the world, but it can show the world, especially when it is changing.” His photographs of Tibet, taken before the ethnic submersion, speak of politics, religions, morals, culture, but above all, people. A single image blends everything together: faces, costumes, landscapes, buildings, shrines and, more secretly, ideas and dogmas. They move and inform us, resonating in time and space long after. Riboud has never given himself any mission or constraints. He hates labels as much as he hates dissertations on a process that is for him an instinct more than a discipline. “Taking pictures is like savoring life at 125^th of a second…It is the instinct of the instant and the instant of the instinct,” says the photographer.

Black Current: Mexican Responses to Japanese Art, 17th -19th Centuries

Thursday, October 21, 2010 - Sunday, January 02, 2011

Celebration in 2010 of the bi-centennial of Mexico’s independence (1810) and the centennial of her Revolution (1910) presented an occasion to explore the rich and sometimes overlooked contact between Asia and Mexico in the centuries following the exploits of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan, and Hernan Cortés.

As “The Viceroyalty of New Spain” between 1521and 1821, Mexico was a strategic player in a network of trade linking Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Silver, insects, and friars went west to Asia on galleons following the equatorial currents, and the same galleons returned on a northern easterly current called by the Japanese Kuroshio or the “Black Current.”  Headed to Mexico, were silks and other textiles (raw and worked), dyestuffs, gemstones, ceramics, ivories, medicines, woods, furniture including screens and boxes, cutlery, armor, and animals.

The Crow Collection was eager to bring together an exhibition that was inspired by a specific cultural thread in Asia and had an enduring cultural imprint in Mexico.  The exhibition took shape in two dimensions that seemed to point to direct inspiration from Japan—two pictorial formats—folding screens and rolled paintings--and the use of shell inlay on dark ground.  The inlaid objects are frames and borders made to look like lacquer, furniture using a local varnish called “barniz de pasto,” and paintings known in Mexico as enconchados—“incorporating shell.”  While each of these objects suggests direct exposure to Japanese works of art, even they exhibit degrees of inspiration that range from pure quotation, to local equivalencies, to autonomous flights of distinctive Mexican cultural identity. 

Visitors are invited to follow this inquiry into Mexican responses to Japanese art in approximately 25 objects gathered from collections in Mexico and the United States.

Snuff Bottles from the Hippo Collection

Saturday, May 22, 2010 - Sunday, October 24, 2010

A vibrant selection of snuff bottles from the Hippo Collection now complements the museum’s own holdings, currently on view in the Snuff Bottle Court, with new styles of design and workmanship from the seemingly endless repertory of the art form. The name of the collection derives from numerous depictions of hippopotomi that the owner has collected, although no images of the humorous and friendly creature appear among the snuff bottle designs in this exhibition.

New Vision: Ballpoint Drawings by Il Lee

Saturday, May 22, 2010 - Sunday, September 26, 2010

Il Lee is a New York artist who for over 30 years has been exploring contemporary possibilities in drawing and painting in his chosen medium of ball point pen. In recent years his massing of looping, energetic lines have given way to more angular, more interrupted even more urgent, styles of mark making. His work is far-ranging. He has created massive monolithic forms on equally large canvases, as well as continually experimented in countless smaller drawings and with various grounds and integrations of line work and color. Lee’s rigorous approach allows the viewer to be sensitive to nuances created through the smallest of deliberate changes—a thicker line, a more compact swirl, a smoother ground. 

As with other contemporary artists legitimately extending the possibilities for abstraction, an interest in a particular genre is left behind. Remaining are concrete issues—within a commitment to explore the ballpoint medium are the possibilities of infinite approaches, so the most fruitful limitations must be set; certain evocative moods can be created through manipulation of line and form but summoning these moods with intent can lead to a sentimental practice so a focus must be kept on expanding the potential of the medium and not on using a reductive selection of tricks. As a result, and perhaps counter-intuitively, as well as being concrete exercises in how a medium depicts light, line, and form, his works also capture the ineffable. 

In exploring the language of modernism Lee has moved through minimalistic representation of line and form to a more abstracted language of kinetics. His progression is far from a retooling of modernist approaches and much more an exploration of timeless and contemporary concerns from within his own highly developed practice. 

Il Lee has been the subject of a critically acclaimed retrospective at the San Jose Museum of Art and solo exhibitions at major cultural institutions including the Queens Museum of Art and the Vilcek Foundation in New York.

Organized in collaboration with Art Projects International, New York.

Modern Twist: Bamboo Works from the Clark Center and the Art of Motoko Maio

Saturday, May 01, 2010 - Sunday, September 05, 2010

The Crow Collection explores the intersection of tradition, innovation, and design this spring by pairing the traditional arts of basket making and screen making- the first a selection of works form the Clark Center in Hanford, California, and the second the exquisite work of artist Motoko Maio.

On Baskets . . .

Bamboo groves are quintessential parts of the Japanese landscape and are cultivated in the gardens of temples and houses. Since the 8th century, bamboo baskets have been used to hold flowers scattered during Buddhist ceremonies. Over the centuries, elegant bamboo containers were used during ceremonial tea presentations, called chanoyu and sencha, as well as in the art of floral arranging. For many years, bamboo works remained utilitarian in nature, and it was not until the mid-20th century that a small number of artists left the traditional path and experimented with more sculptural forms. These bold experiments in turn influenced the art of contemporary Japanese basket making.

The exhibition at the Crow Collection presents twenty bamboo baskets from the mid-1940s to 2008, with a strong emphasis on works from the 21st century. Some of these works have never been exhibited before, such as the new “Composition through lines” series by visionary artist Uematsu Chikyu, in which he experiments with forms that have openings that appear unfinished. -Andreas Marks, Curator

On Screens . . .

The folding screen of Japan has many facets beyond the physical attributes of its multiple panels. It is at once fine art, decorative art, furniture, and symbolic object. As an object of fine art, the screen replaces the single canvas of Western painting; as decorative art, it provides unparalleled beauty in an architectural setting; as furniture, it gives personal control and flexibility to space; and as symbolic object it expresses power, prestige, status, and cultural authority. First seen in European collections beginning in the 16th century, the folding screen, or byobu, remains an iconic representation of Japanese cultural aesthetics.

This spring, the Crow Collection presents the most contemporary expression of this traditional form in the works of Motoko Maio. Using traditional techniques and materials in dramatically innovative ways, as well as playing with form, Maio pays reverence to this stately art while totally transforming it and placing it securely in a 21st-century social and artistic context. -Lesley Kehoe, Curator

This exhibition is curated by Caron Smith, Andreas Marks, and Lesley Kehoe.

Blossoming Stone: Qing Dynasty Jade

Saturday, September 19, 2009 - Sunday, August 01, 2010

In conjunction with Wild Flowering: The Crow Family and Asia, the special exhibition Blossoming Stone: Qing Dynasty Jade will present a selection of over 100 pieces from the museum's jade collection, long noted for its impressive craftsmanship, diverse artistic styles, and comprehensive nature. This collection was formed by the late Trammell Crow in a period spanning over three decades. Guided by his discerning connoisseurship and instinct for beauty, Trammell created this collection that is the heart and soul of the Crow Collection of Asian Art.

China: Impermanent Beauty 1996-97

Saturday, February 20, 2010 - Sunday, May 16, 2010

Photographs by Ka Yeung

The inauguration of the newly dedicated gallery space at the Crow Collection, LinkAsia, will present art works that provide a contemporary global path to understanding Asia through unique perspectives and mediums. Coinciding with the reveal of the space is yet another launch, Ka Yeung.

Born in 1953, in Hong Kong, Ka Yeung has built a body of personal work in the photography medium that will be presented for the first time. During the past thirty years of his commercial photography career, Yeung has continued to extend his personal vision to subjects that express his spiritual and poetic nature.

While visiting China in 1996-97, Yeung wished to specifically view the Yangtze River (Long River) before the middle stream was flooded by the Three Gorges Dam. A large part of Chinese history relates to this river and for Yeung, it is a significant example of change in our world.

The scale of the black and white prints endeavor to bring the viewer to the forefront of his discoveries and provide a portal into a fading landscape, a city of contrasts, a layered garden wall crumbling, a bicycle parking area obsolete while still in use. The images hold the viewer in the present and allow an initial reaction of still, tranquil beauty to dream, without a melancholy longing for faded beauty. The power of the photography is in the documentation that was, and is, the past, along with the future. There is no difference and no sentimental desire. We can see through the eyes of Yeung that the simplest of views and objects are the beauty of the moment, as nothing is permanent.


 

Seizing the New World: Recent Paintings by Yang Jin Long

Saturday, January 23, 2010 - Sunday, April 18, 2010

Seizing the New World presents Yang Jin Long's new paintings created in the last two years. Yang moved to the United States from China three years ago. Since his arrival, Yang has been exploring his new surroundings by creating vibrant, provocative and imaginative paintings.  Eight pairs of large canvas paintings, one series depicting the Four Seasons and second series a colorful exploration of bright hues and celebration of good wishes and fortune. A set of smaller paintings of Chinese Zodiac will be included in the exhibition to commemorate the 2010 Year of the Tiger.

Yang’s  extensive training in traditional Chinese painting gives him great poetical depth in his approach to oil painting.  Yang expressed, "At last, I am able to paint with colors and images with no limitation." These paintings show Yang’s acute talent and ability to transform his new medium to a marvelous visual feast bringing together on the same stage, references to Western and Chinese art masterpieces, music, literature, science, and culture.

YEOHLEE: DESIGN FOR NOW

Saturday, October 03, 2009 - Sunday, January 03, 2010

This is the first major exhibition in Dallas about the work of Yeohlee, whose name is synonymous with design innovation and artistic integrity. Yeohlee’s work has been exhibited at museums in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Amsterdam, Berlin and Washington D.C.

YEOHLEE: DESIGN FOR NOW will feature selected fashion designs and concepts from Yeohlee’s 2004–2009 collections. The focus will be on the evolution of her approach to design, which closely parallels architectural concerns but is ultimately attentive to the body. The exhibition explores four primary themes: Urban Nomad, Made in New York, Fluid Geometry, and Zero Waste. These concepts illustrate the artist’s thought process as one collection gives way to the next. This exhibition will be in the Mezzanine gallery and inside The Skybridge.

This exhibition is curated by Myra Walker, Director and Curator of the Texas Fashion Collection, College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas.

WILD FLOWERING: The Crow Family and Asia

Saturday, September 19, 2009 - Sunday, January 03, 2010

WILD FLOWERING: The Crow Family and Asia is an exhibition that showcases the adventures of the Crow family during their five-decade quest to collect the arts of Asia. Starting in 1960 and ending in the present day, this chronological exploration of the family’s private acquisitions profiles their evolution into a public treasure. At the heart of the story are Trammell and Margaret Crow – a gracious, industrious, and visionary couple – who inspired their family to embrace the cultures of Asia long before their museum opened to the world in 1998. The captivating result of this love of Asia, a diverse collection of art assembled by two generations of the Crow family, is narrated through original photographs, letters, and other materials from the Crow Family Archives.

In conjunction with Wild Flowering: The Crow Family and Asia, the special exhibition BLOSSOMING STONE: Qing Dynasty Jade presents a vibrant selection of over one hundred pieces from the museum’s renowned jade collection. Long noted for its craftsmanship, impressive artistic styles, and comprehensive nature, this collection of the “stone of heaven” ranks among the highlights of the museum’s holdings.

Wild Flowering: The Crow Family and Asia and Blossoming Stone: Qing Dynasty Jade are curated by Dr. Caron Smith and Shiyuan Yuan.

Tending the Afterlife: Chinese Tomb Art from the Neolithic Period to the Ming Dynasty

Saturday, September 27, 2008 - Sunday, August 16, 2009

This exhibition showcases a spectacular selection of objects from the permanent collection of the Crow Collection of Asian Art and works on loan from the Collection of Penn and Margarida Williamson in Houston and the Collection of John L. and Rosemarie in San Antonio. Covering almost six millennia of Chinese visual culture—from the Neolithic period (c. 10,000 B.C.–c.1600 B.C.)to the Ming dynasty (1368–1644)—these objects represent the artistic creativity and technical virtuosity achieved by the Chinese artisans. Being included in tombs as burial furnishings, these objects would ensure that, in another world, the soul of the deceased could continue to possess the wealth, power, and religious tranquility enjoyed in his or her previous life.

The Return of the Yellow Peril: A Survey of the Work of Roger Shimomura, 1969–2007

Saturday, June 06, 2009 - Sunday, August 09, 2009

A third-generation Japanese American, Roger Shimomura (b. 1939) has emerged as an elder statesman of contemporary social commentary. For almost forty years, his art has focused on racial insensitivities levied at Asian-Americans. Named after the series of paintings the artist completed in 1993, the exhibitions title Return of the Yellow Peril plays on the derogatory color metaphors for Asians that originated in the 19th-century. After he joined the art faculty at the University of Kansas in 1969, Shimomura began creating art inspired by his experience as a Japanese American. Over the years, his artwork evolved from light-hearted satire to strident critique and from paintings and prints to assemblages and performance art. This exhibition will testify that "Roger Shimomura is always the skeptic, but never a cynic,"says Dee Harris, Mid-America's director of visual arts and humanities. "He's pursued the art of social commentary while grounded in an ongoing hope for positive change."

This exhibition is a program of ExhibitsUSA, a national division of Mid-America Arts Alliance, with the Texas Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Japanese Snuff Bottles from the Trammell S. Crow Collection

Saturday, January 10, 2009 - Sunday, May 03, 2009

This exhibition showcases a remarkable selection of japanese snuff bottles produced in the Meiji period, in response to the Western demand for all things Asian. Japanese craftsmen used all kinds of material with a variety of techniques to produce small, attractive, desirable objects that could be commerically exploited. The bottles in this exhibition fall into two categories - those produced as a result of growing demand by Western collectors and those made as direct copies of Chinese originals. The snuff bottles in this exhibition represent the most superb techinical virtuosity and artistic senility of Japanese craftsmen in the late 19th century.

Stitching the Seasons: Contemporary Japanese Quilts

Saturday, January 24, 2009 - Sunday, April 19, 2009

Although quilting originated in Asia, Japanese women did not participate in this art form in modern times until the last two decades of the twentieth century. Once exposed to American quilts, Japanese quilters infused nineteenth and early twentieth century American patchwork and applique patters with their own eastern aesthetic, taking the art form to a new level.

The Japanese sense of color, attention to detail, and fine handling of fabrics have resulted in dazzling quilts. The works of art selected for this exhibition are those in which each artist has worked with a recognizable American quilt pattern that has been augmented with the overlay of an eastern aesthetic. The Crow Collection joins seventeen other Dallas institutions in the Quilt Mania II exhibitions.

Untamed Beauty: Tigers in Japanese Art

Saturday, January 10, 2009 - Sunday, March 08, 2009

Untamed Beauty: Tigers in Japanese Art is an exhibition of tiger paintings, products of the fertile imaginations of twenty-one Japanese artists. Many of Japan's most famous painters of the last three hundred years are represented in this remarkable exhibiton. Tigers are not indigenous to Japan but their absence spurred fanciful ideas about their nature and physical form. The idea of such giant, powerful cats so captivated Japanese imaginations that they produced innumerable paintings of them over the course of their history - most without the benefit of firsthand observations. Japanese artists skillfully rendered the tiger's physical appearance, but also sought to convey something of the tiger's mood or spirit by placing it in specific context. This exhibition is organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

BIG! Himalayan Art

Saturday, May 10, 2008 - Thursday, February 05, 2009

BIG! Himalayan Art focuses on large-scale works of art in the collection of New York's Rubin Museum of Art. The exhibition includes sixteen paintings, appliqué textiles, tangkas (painting or textile work on cloth), and ritual objects. Viewers are invited to experience the awe–inspiring scale that characterizes art as it is frequently displayed in temples and at community festivals in the Himalayas. The exhibition looks at why works of art are made in large sizes, where they are traditionally displayed, and how and why they are used. BIG! Himalayan Art provides a sense of the scale that is perceived by bringing together over-life-sized, intricately detailed, kaleidoscopically colored works of art.

This exhibition is organized by the Rubin Museum of Art, New York, in collaboration with The Crow Collection of Asian Art. BIG! Himalayan Art received local sponsorship from the Crescent Real Estate Equities Company.

Texas Collects Asia: Contemporary Art

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - Sunday, January 04, 2009

Texas collects Asia is a year-long series of five exhibitions that pays homage to the Texan collector. Texas Collects Asia: Contemporary Art is a final, forward-thinking installment that showcases Asia as the future, examining the explosive trends found in prints, paintings, photographs, and sculpture of some of the most cutting-edge artists from China, Japan, and Vietnam.

Texas Collects Asia: Japanese Folk Art

Saturday, October 18, 2008 - Sunday, December 28, 2008

An exclusive look at the art of private collecting in Texas and a part of the year-long series Texas Collects Asia, Texas Collects Asia: Japanese Folk Art explores Japan's renowned folk craft tradition by showcasing an impressive array of religious sculptures, paintings, and children's toys as well as Mingei ceramics, panels, and other hand-made goods for everyday use and enjoyment.

Texas Collects Asia: China

Saturday, July 12, 2008 - Sunday, September 28, 2008

This exhibition will focus on a group of impressive Chinese works of art from private collection across Texas. The wide range of artistic achievements from imperial China will be illuminated through carefully selected jade carvings, bronze vessels, porcelains, wooden carvings, and paintings. As it was for the Crow family, Chinese art, from ancient bronzes to imperial porcelains, has been of great interest to families in Texas over the last fifty years.

Documenting China: Contemporary Photography and Social Change

Saturday, May 17, 2008 - Sunday, September 28, 2008

In the new exhibition Documenting China: Contemporary Photography and Social Change, Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service partners with Bates College Museum of Art in Lewiston, Maine, to explore the modern essence of the most populous nation on earth. Through the dramatic works of seven Chinese photographers, visitors will experience the country from an insider’s point of view. With raw black-and-white and color images, photographers Liu Xiaodi, Jiang Jian, Zhang Xinmin, Luo Yongjin, Zhou Hai, Lu Yuanmin, and Zhou Min unveil the truth about China’s internal struggle—a battle between modern industrialism and the traditional, agrarian past that has sustained the country for thousands of years.

Texas Collects Asia: India and Southeast Asia

Saturday, April 19, 2008 - Sunday, June 22, 2008

This exhibition will feature over sixty works of art from the 12th century onward and explores the vibrant and complicated religious system in Indian and other Southeast Asian countries. Through the highly dramatic votive sculptures and paintings, the visitor will have the possibility of experiencing the sacred events and mythology of ancient India and Southeast Asia. The artworks are selected from six private collections and two museums in Texas. They illustrate the iconographical and stylistic diversity encompassing Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

The CARU Collection of Chinese Snuff Bottles, Part III

Saturday, February 16, 2008 - Sunday, June 15, 2008

This exhibition will showcase masterfully inside-painted snuff bottles by major artists of various schools from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. With a history tracing back to the Jiaqing reign (1796-1820), this group of bottles represent the zenith of inside-painted snuff bottles development. Each bottle is an impeccable combination of glass making, crystal carving with Chinese ink painting and calligraphy. The bottles are decorated with subjects such as landscape, figures, still life, birds and flowers that are depicted either with great naturalism or in calligraphic style favored by literati patrons.

What is Tibetan Art? Selections from the Rubin Museum of Art

Saturday, September 15, 2007 - Sunday, April 27, 2008

You might ask, What is Tibet! Tibet has compromised different territories over its history—an empire stretching across north Asia in the 7th-8th centuries, divided into clan strongholds and around powerful monasteries, subject to pressure from outside armies, and now folded within the boundaries of various countries. In fact “Tibet” is not even called “Tibet” outside the west! The paintings and sculptures in this exhibition provide an overview of history, geography, art, religion and style of Cultural Tibet with its particular kind of Buddhism—known wherever it has taken root as Tibetan Buddhism.

Tibetan art, furthermore, is not restricted to art made by Tibetans! Skilled Newari craftsmen from Kathmandu Valley in Nepal were brought to paint temple murals and to provide ritual supports in the form of paintings and sculpture. Chinese emperors of the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties (13-19th centuries) took religious instruction from Tibetan teachers and sent caravans of imperially produced paintings, objects, silk textiles to their revered prelates. Tibetan Buddhism was embraced by Mongolians who brought their own beliefs and artistic sensibilities, such as familiarity with animal life, under the great tent of Tibetan art. Sample the variety, liveliness, rich color, and provocative ideas as you develop your own understanding of Tibetan art.

Texas Collects Asia: Japan

Friday, January 18, 2008 - Sunday, March 30, 2008

As the first part of a series of five exhibitions in 2008 celebrating our ten-year anniversary, The Crow Collection of Asian Art presents a selection of impressive Japanese paintings and works of art from private collections and museums across Texas. This exhibition will include over twenty Japanese paintings of recent centuries that have subjects of animals, nature, humanity, and legends. These paintings reflect the artistic achievements of various schools of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and highlight the experience and emotion of the scenes. A group of lacquer wares will illustrate the refined sensibility of the merchant class who heavily patronized this type of artworks in the nineteenth century. This exhibition will also showcase fine examples of netsuke, metal wares, screens, and porcelains. They all represent the great interest that Texas collectors have in Japanese art.

The CARU Collection of Chinese Snuff Bottles, Part II

Saturday, September 29, 2007 - Sunday, January 27, 2008

September 29th will mark the opening of the exhibition featuring the CARU Collection that has an exciting selection of bottles made of glass, amber, enameled pottery, and coral. This exhibition is the second of several Chinese snuff bottle exhibitions showcasing bottles with exceptionally high standards of rarity, quality, and condition.

CARU Collection, Part II includes sixty bottles—an important selection of examples from the collection. In particular, there is an impressive group of enameled pottery and ceramic bottles, ingeniously painted with subjects such as court ladies, peonies, and crabs amidst waterweeds. Since snuff-taking had ceased to be fashionable by the 19th century, the bottles had become highly prized for their own sake. This group of carefully chosen bottles will provide a scintillating exhibition that will educate as well as stimulate the senses.

Five Thousand Years of Chinese Ceramics

Saturday, September 29, 2007 - Monday, December 31, 2007

China has one of the most glorious ceramic traditions in the world. This exhibition of over one hundred works from the collection of Robin and R. Randolph Richmond Jr. celebrates the great artistic quality and technical virtuosity of Chinese potters from the Neolithic era through the Yuan dynasty (approximately 4000 B.C. through the fourteenth century). Featuring works from the major traditions and kilns, the exhibition showcases the extraordinary achievements of Chinese potters in both earthenware and stoneware, and in ceramics made for use in this world as well as in the afterlife.

This exhibition traces the development of Chinese ceramics through a chronological presentation that ranges from the sculptural forms and bold painted decoration of Neolithic and early dynastic wares, to the engaging tomb ceramics of the Han through Five Dynasties era (220 B.C.–A.D.970), concluding with the subtle monochromes and exuberantly decorated wares produced during the Song (960–1279) and Yuan eras (1279–1368).

CARU Collection of Snuff Bottles

Friday, May 18, 2007 - Sunday, September 02, 2007

The Crow Collection of Asian Art is proud to present this group of sixty-two jade bottles from the CARU Collection. This unusual presentation of top quality jade bottles from a single collection demonstrates the vast range of color, form, design, and workmanship available in this beautiful and venerated material.

Jade is the generic term for two distinctive minerals, jadeite and nephrite. The rarity of jade and its costliness during antiquity resulted in its association with human virtue and all that is excellent. The Chinese used this almost indestructible material to cover the orifices of the dead in order to prevent the spirit from escaping.

Nephrite, a silicate containing calcium, magnesium, and aluminum, has a hardness of 6.5 on the Mohs scale. It is usually of an opaque, creamy color most prized in its pure white or yellow form. Nephrite is also found in colors ranging from pale gray to shades of green and white.

The main source of nephrite for the Chinese was the Kunlun Mountains, which form the boundary between Chinese Turkestan and Tibet. It was initially found as stones on river beds until mining began in earnest in the late 16th century. Traders brought the stone to the Chinese courts. The amount of nephrite dramatically increased after Emperor Qianlong (r. 1736–1795) conquered Turkestan in 1759. After 1759 new sources in the area yielded abundant supplies of nephrite of superior quality in very large blocks.

Jadeite, a silicate of sodium and aluminum, is slightly harder than nephrite on the Mohs scale (6.5–7). It is often translucent with an “icy” crystalline structure sometimes apparent to the naked eye. Jadeite comes in a variety of colors almost as great as that of nephrite. It is renowned for its apple and emerald tones, which are of gem quality, and can also be found in shades of blue and lavender, which are not found in nephrite. Jadeite has not been found in China itself; the earliest record of the stone being imported into China from Burma was during the Qianlong period.

As a tough material, jade has to be worked by wearing away the surfaces using tools primed with abrasives such as crushed corundum and garnet. By the late 16th century, Chinese craftsmen carved jade using tools powered by foot pedals, which left their hands free to manoeuvre the material with greater ease. It would have taken a craftsman several years to transform a rough stone boulder into works of art: he would initially have produced the desired form, and then created the minute details of a pattern before polishing the surfaces. In the case of snuff bottles, a considerable amount of the precious material was wasted as the interior was hollowed out; however, because snuff bottles are so small they could be carved from the hollow areas of larger items such as libation cups. 

Usually between two and three inches tall, snuff bottles are meant to be held in the hand, looked at closely, and scrutinized with intensity. The variety of colors and shades, along with the fissures and imperfections in the stone, provided the perfect stimulus to a craftsman in the creation of the final masterpiece. The opportunity to experience this variety for ourselves is what makes this group of bottles so fascinating.

- Consulting Curator, Robert Hall

Over the past thrity years, Mr. Hall has become one of the leading Chinese Snuff Bottle dealers in the field. He has played an intregal role in the formation of many of the world's great collections.

Female Buddhas: Women of Enlightenment in Himalayan Art

Thursday, February 08, 2007 - Sunday, August 26, 2007

Female Buddhas inaugurates RMA in Dallas, the new partnership between Rubin Museum of Art and The Crow Collection of Asian Art. With objects dating from the thirteenth through the nineteenth century, the exhibition includes sculptures and colorful paintings of fully realized women of power, compassion, and omniscience, including Tara, the most popular female Buddha in Tibet. Compelling expressions of the feminine are represented through vibrant color, fluid line, and rich symbolism, the distinguishing qualities of Himalayan art.

RMA in Dallas will present a series of exhibitions developed from RMA’s permanent collection that will explore the rich art found in the regions surrounding a 1,800-mile arc of high mountains and deep valleys that stretch from Afghanistan to Myanmar (Burma). The Himalayan cultural sphere was immortalized by the Silk Road, an iconic bridge comprising a series of land routes across Asia. In this spirit, RMA is expanding beyond its New York home by establishing long-term partnerships with like-minded institutions. RMA in Dallas is the first of these initiatives.

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U-Ram Choe: New Media from Seoul

Thursday, June 07, 2007 - Saturday, August 18, 2007

The Crow Collection of Asian Art welcomes a solo exhibition of work by Korean artist U-Ram Choe (b. 1970, Seoul). The Mezzanine of The Crow Collection will be transformed with large-scale metal and plastic mechanical forms that engage in a fanciful dialog of aesthetics and machinery while exploring themes of biological transformation, flight, and movement.

The machines materialize with such a delicacy and weightlessness that they seem to take on a shape and silhouette of organic life forms. Motors, heat and light-sensitive materials add to the intricacy of Choe’s kinetic sculptures. With titles that incorporate scientific nomenclature such as Urbanus, Scientific Name: Anmopista Volaticus Floris Uram, the work is reminiscent of a prehistoric exhibit at a natural science or history museum. There are certain elements of recognition: Mechanical diagrams, text descriptions of habitats, visible evidence of fins evolving into wings, and even propellers. The warm biological livelihoods of machine-creatures become the subject in Choe’s work. These dynamic forms embody emotion and have anthropological roots, despite their streamlined metallic sheen.

Organized by bitforms gallery, NYC | Seoul with Support from One Arts Plaza

Changing Identity: Recent Works by Women Artists from Vietnam

Friday, March 16, 2007 - Sunday, May 27, 2007

Changing Identity introduces the work of ten contemporary Vietnamese women artists who challenge the stereotypes and traditional roles of women in Vietnamese society. This exhibition is the first survey of women artists from Vietnam to tour the United States. Through the use of various media, subject matters, and aesthetic sensibilities, two generations of artists share views of their country and the changing status of women. Together their work provides a diverse view of Vietnam itself, reflecting a range of opinions and experiences.

Vietnamese history and folklore is laden with tales of heroic women. In 43 AD, two sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, riding on elephants, successfully drove away the invading Chinese army. Later, in 248 AD, Trieu Au, also fought off enemy forces in a cunning display of feminine power. The Vietnamese nation itself has an origin myth involving the union of a dragon and a fairy who parented 100 children. These exploits and a strong matriarchal tradition notwithstanding, women in Vietnam have not always been recognized for their contributions toward the national culture.

Vietnamese art has a long history, but the colonial period of French occupation from the late 19th century until 1945 shaped much of what is known today as Vietnamese national art. It was in 1925 that an art school was established in Hanoi and the first generation of academic painters and sculptors were educated. Emancipated in other ways due to their exposure to Western culture, only three women graduated from the colonial art school. After independence, that number multiplied considerably with nearly 50 percent of subsequent graduating classes consisting of women.

Still, today, living in a developing economy after decades of poverty and war, facing pressures of work, family life and male domination, women are often ignored in art exhibitions. Changing Identity is not trying to single out women as a unique category of artists in Vietnam, but rather celebrate the diverse expressions of female identity in a changing society. Each artist in this exhibition shares a unique perspective on her own culture. Rather than creating a generic stereotype of women in Vietnam, this exhibition aims to emphasize Vietnamese women’s individual experiences and personalities in order to challenge both the notion of “woman” as a single category and the “Vietnamese artist” as a single genre of art. These women illustrate not just the multiple faces of Vietnamese society but also the diversity of artistic expressions. Vietnamese art today is emerging as a creative force in large part because of the contributions made by women who, more than their male counterparts, dare to rebel against conformity.

Changing Identity is organized by International Arts & Artists, Washington, DC, and supported in part by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation and the Henry Luce Foundation. Educational activities made possible by a grant from the Ford Foundation, Hanoi office, and fiscally administered by the Institute of International Education.

The Spinnaker Collection of Chinese Snuff Bottles

Thursday, December 14, 2006 - Sunday, April 15, 2007

December 14, The Crow Collection of Asian Art will open its first loan exhibition featuring antique Chinese snuff bottles. The works of art from the Spinnaker Collection, a private collection of exceptionally rare quality and condition, will be on view through April 15, 2007.

The Spinnaker Collection of Chinese Snuff Bottles provides intriguing insight into the extraordinary lengths to which the Imperial workshops of Qing Dynasty China (1644-1912) sought to impress the Emperors, aristocrats and literati.

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Immortal Images: Chinese Jades from the Permanent Collection of Trammell & Margaret Crow

Monday, January 01, 2007 - Saturday, March 31, 2007

The Crows have traveled extensively throughout the world, but Asia is a favorite destination.  "Our first visit to China came in 1976 right before Chairman Mao Tse-tung died," Mrs. Crow said.  "Very few foreigners were allowed inside China at that time, but we received permission because of Dallas Market Center’s involvement with the Canton Trade Fair." Tight restrictions on exports from China prevented the Crows from making many direct buys of art during their 14 subsequent visits to the country. 

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News from Abroad: Japanese Woodblock Prints from Yokohama, Japan

Friday, July 21, 2006 - Sunday, September 10, 2006

 Bewilderment, confusion, fascination, fear and astonishment describe the reaction to the arrival of Western trade ships in Japanese ports in the mid-19th Century. Bizarre languages, alien customs and exotic-looking people penetrated Japanese society bridging the East and the West. On display this summer at The Crow Collection - News from Abroad: Woodblock Prints from Yokohama, Japan is the first artistic medium to respond to the new influences affecting Japanese society in the 1850s.

Go to Press Release

Touching the Mekong: A Southeast Asian Sojourn

Friday, April 14, 2006 - Sunday, July 09, 2006

Touching the Mekong: A Southeast Asian Sojourn
Contemporary black-and-white photography depicts life in Southeast Asia

Imagine contemporary life in mainland Southeast Asia…Vietnam, Myanmar (Burma), Cambodia and Laos.  Through more than 50 black-and-white images taken from 2001-2002, photographer Andrea Baldeck visually guides visitors through the cultures and into the lives of people living in Southeast Asia.   Explore this rare and sensitive depiction of life bridging thousands of miles and creating a personal connection with its viewers. Let your journey begin.

Touching the Mekong is distinctive because it illustrates modern life in a region that is often overlooked. Since the end of America’s involvement in Vietnam, the culture of Southeast Asia has been largely unexamined, but Baldeck’s works successfully highlight the subject matters of children, families, workers, market places, religious relics and lush scenery. The images are at once clean, honest and peaceful depictions of daily life in the region. The Touching the Mekong exhibit images were gleaned from 200 rolls of film taken from Baldeck’s two excursions to Southeast Asia.

A fine-art photographer such as Baldeck works exclusively in black-and-white and completes all of her own darkroom processing and printing. Making careful use of light and shadow, contrast and composition, she sees the photography in this exhibit as “a personal account of textured, nuanced, enigmatic moments in a fascinating world.”

Baldeck had many careers before becoming a photographer. She was a musician specializing in the French horn and flute as well as an anesthesiologist in several Philadelphia area hospitals and has worked as a volunteer internist in Haiti and Grenada, bringing her camera along in her medicine bag. In the early 1990s she left music and medicine behind and committed to photography, and by 1996 she had published her first book of photography, The Heart of Haiti.

Baldeck’s photography has been shown in the Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida; Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York; Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia; and the Century Club, Rochester, New York.

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Ancient Threads Newly Woven

Wednesday, March 01, 2006 - Saturday, March 25, 2006

Ancient Threads, Newly Woven: Recent Art from China’s Silk Road is an exhibit of more than 75 paintings by contemporary artists from China’s ancient Silk Road region. The 2,000-year-old caravan route linked East and West for centuries by facilitating the exchange of goods and ideas, and bringing profound changes to those living or passing along its path. The works in the exhibit depict the life and culture of various stops on this ancient passage. Ancient Threads is the largest installation of paintings presented by the Trammell & Margaret Crow Collection of Asian Art since the museum’s inception in 1998.

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True Words: Wood Sculpture Relief from Shandong, China

Wednesday, September 21, 2005 - Monday, January 02, 2006

True Words: Wood Sculpture Relief by a Group of Artists from Shandong, China, is an exceptional exhibit making its third appearance in the United States since 2003. This is its second appearance in Texas. It will run at the Crow Collection from September 21, 2005 – January 2, 2006. Admission is free. The twenty pieces of the True Words exhibit are artistically captivating and emotionally moving. The works have been created by a group of deaf and mute artists in their early thirties, who live and work near the northeast coast of China.
The eight artists live with their adopted guardians in a remote village outside the town of Wei Fang, China. Notably, the works and artistic genius are not compromised by their imposing disabilities. The ability to reflect upon poignant subject matter such as family relationships, sexual anxieties and longing for brotherhood are articulated through these intricate carvings.

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Geisha to Diva

Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - Sunday, May 15, 2005

The Crow Collection of Asian Art will present this collection of kimonos along with costumes, several pieces of furniture, souvenirs, and records.  Woodblock prints illustrating the life of geishas are also part of the exhibition and include an actual print of Ichimaru herself.  The exhibition will open Wednesday, Jan. 12 with a members’ preview Tuesday, Jan. 11 from 6-8 p.m.  The show will close May 15.

Ichimaru was born into a poor family and became a geisha in the 1920s and early 30s. She gained a reputation as an elegant and beautiful Geisha who possessed a "nightingale-like voice". She signed a contract with Victor Records and remained a popular singer who performed in geisha regalia from the 1930s to the 1970s. She died in her nineties.

The kimonos in this exhibition reflect her taste from the 1930s to the 1970s. The costumes are preserved in almost pristine condition and reflect several different styles and methods of decoration.

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