Collection: Asian Art

Asian Art

The Department of Asian Art has a broad selection of holdings spanning a period of almost 5,000 years and covering the geographic areas of East Asia (China, Japan, and Korea), South and Southeast Asia, and the Islamic world. This region, where six major world religions and philosophical systems of thought evolved—Confucianism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Shintō, and Daoism, has nurtured some of the world's greatest civilizations.

Of the approximately 4,000 objects in the collection, about half are stored with the works on paper collection in the Chace Center’s Minskoff Center for Prints, Drawings, and Photographs. These include Chinese and Japanese prints and printed books, East Asian paintings, and a small but fine selection of Indian and Islamic drawings and paintings.

In terms of quality, scope, and rarity, the Japanese prints collection contains some of the most outstanding groupings. The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller collection of 720 Japanese bird-and-flower prints (kachōga), which spans the development of this category of material during the Edo period (1603-1868), is exceptional in its depth and scope and is almost unequalled in other museum and private collections. Another group of 88 rare and beautiful surimono (privately commissioned prints) donated to the Museum in 1956 had been sent back to the United States in early 1863 by Raphael Pumpelly (1837-1923), geologist, explorer, and archaeologist. These prints came from a single album, one of two presented as gifts to Pumpelly on his departure from Japan soon after that country opened its doors to visitors from the West. Not only are these some of the earliest prints to leave Japan, but the album’s unique association with Osaka is confirmed through the inclusion of Osaka poets and printmakers whose works are not as well known as those from Edo (modern-day Tokyo).

The Asian sculpture collection is also noteworthy, ranging from Indian Buddhist and Hindu materials to Chinese and Japanese works of high quality. Of these, the most outstanding is the exceptionally important, later twelfth-century wooden Dainichi Nyorai Buddha, the largest (about nine feet tall) seated Japanese figural sculpture in the United States. The Buddha is on permanent exhibition in its own gallery.

The collection of approximately 2,000 three-dimensional objects includes ceramics; carved jades and hardstones; ivory, wood, stone, and metal sculpture; and bronze, brass, and other metalwork. The holdings of early Chinese archaeological materials and later decorative arts are broadest in their scope and range. Within the Japanese collection, the highly unusual palanquin was intended to transport a bride of the Ichijō branch of the aristocratic Fujiwara family to the home of her husband-to-be, who was descended from Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543-1616), the first Edo-period shōgun (military ruler). Among the Korean objects of greatest interest is a small group of early bronzes and several paintings. In addition to the fine Indian sculpture on display, that collection contains a small but distinguished group of Mughal objects. The Southeast Asian collection has been significantly enhanced by the addition of 33 objects given by the Doris Duke Foundation in 2004. Highlights include gilded bronze and wooden sculpture and finely crafted applied-arts objects. In the Islamic collection, the cenotaph (turbat) is the earliest intact, signed, and dated example in any museum collection. A memorial marker for Taj al-Mulk wal-Din Abul-Qasim, this outstanding object was made for his shrine (imamzada) in Māzandarān (northern Iran near the Caspian Sea). The Islamic collection also contains a selection of fine ceramics. The Islamic and Indian collections together include works of art in all media that celebrate the artistic heritage of the Arab, Indian, Persian, and Turkish cultures.