Asian Art Collection

The gallery that you're standing in now is part of a reinstallation of more than 50 galleries in this Cass Gilbert designed main building of the St. Louis Art Museum and the galleries are complementing the new East building which will open at the end of June. So in the suite of Asian galleries here at the Art Museum we've recently reinstalled this gallery which is for ancient Chinese jades and bronzes. We've installed a brand new gallery of Korean art for the first time in the museum's history. We've got a new Japanese art on view, a new gallery for Japanese and Chinese export porcelain and we've got a new gallery for South Asian and Himalayan art. We have Buddhist art, we have Islamic art and of course we have Hindu art as well. The bronzes that you see in this gallery range from about 1400 BC all the way to about 200 BC and during this period of China's Bronze Age there was very very high technology that was used to make these complicated bronzes with very elaborate decoration. Ancient Chinese jades in our collection, some of the oldest pieces are about 3000 BC and then we have a variety of jades that go till about all the way actually to the 18th century. It's the first time in the museum's history that a gallery has been devoted solely to Korean art and that's a very important thing because Korean art serves in many ways as the bridge between Chinese art and Japanese art. For example Buddhism went from China through Korea into Japan and also in the history of ceramics in East Asia the Koreans played a very important role in adopting Chinese ceramic technology and then bringing that expertise to Japan. We have one gallery at the at the Art Museum here which is devoted to works of art on silk and paper from East Asia so it can be either all Chinese or all Japanese or a mixture of both. Primarily that gallery shows things that are light sensitive and cannot be on display for a very long time so they have to come in rotations so that we can preserve the art in the collection for future generations. In some of our Japanese galleries you'll see things that were made many centuries ago that look really modern with simple clean lines that look like they could have been made yesterday in some modern design studio but they were made centuries ago. So I think there's a lot of back and forth and overlap between ancient and modern times. I think it's important for people to realize that very very early on people in Asia were doing extremely interesting things with art. They were using complicated technologies, they were inventive, they were creative, they had a great sense of design. If you look around in this bronze gallery you'll see some amazing objects from thousands of years ago that were done with technology that was invented by the Chinese but at the same time I think one of the wonderful things about Asian art is the huge variety because there are so many cultures and because the cultures span such a long time you can really see a wide expanse of material, of shapes, of functions, of religious and secular symbolism so there's really something for everyone.