Yin Yu Tang: A Chinese Home, interior. Photo by Dennis Helmar.
Asia Week New York is excited to welcome the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) to our network of world-class institutions. Founded in 1799 as the East India Marine Society—an organization of sea captains who collected works of art and culture during their global voyages—PEM is rooted in a legacy of international exchange and curiosity about the wider world. Today, the museum remains dedicated to presenting art within its broader cultural context, linking past and present while celebrating creativity across time and geography. With exceptionally rich holdings in art, history, architecture, decorative arts, and photography, displayed in both historic and contemporary spaces, PEM holds the distinction of being the oldest continuously operating and collecting museum in the United States.
PEM’s Asian art collections are among the most significant in the nation, reflecting New England’s longstanding maritime connections with China, Japan, Korea, and beyond. Highlights include major holdings of Chinese export art, the extraordinary Qing-dynasty merchant’s house Yin Yu Tang—carefully relocated and reassembled on the museum’s campus—important Japanese works shaped by the pioneering scholarship of Edward Sylvester Morse, and one of the earliest Korean art collections in the United States. Together, these collections illuminate centuries of artistic exchange and cultural encounter between Asia and the West.
Discover the Peabody Essex Museum for yourself and immerse yourself in its captivating exhibitions and extraordinary displays. Highlights currently on view include:
Yin Yu Tang: A Chinese Home
Ongoing
During the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), a prosperous merchant named Huang built a stately 16-bedroom house in China’s southeastern Huizhou region, calling his home Yin Yu Tang, meaning “Hall of Plentiful Shelter.” The house was home to the Huang family for more than 200 years until the last descendants moved from the village in 1982. In the 1990s, as part of a mutually beneficial cultural exchange, the home and its contents were carefully dismantled and transported to Massachusetts for eventual installation on PEM’s campus. Over the course of seven years, a team of museum curators and educators working in concert with preservation architects and traditional Chinese and American craftspeople re-erected the home. In 2003, Yin Yu Tang opened to visitors, telling the complex story of its past and recent history and transforming it from a multigenerational family residence to a historic house in a museum setting at PEM.
Learn more about Yin Yu Tang here.
Double Happiness: Celebration in Chinese Art
On view through May 3, 2026
Come and experience the liveliness of a drinking party, the opulence of a royal wedding and poetic evocation of spring on a delicate dish. Discover plants and animals, myths and symbols and decipher the Chinese character for “Double Happiness.” With more than 30 highlights from the museum’s wide-ranging Chinese collection spanning 3,000 years, this exhibition celebrates China’s artistic achievements crystallized in seasonal festivals, religious ceremonies and celebrations.
Learn more about Double Happiness here.
Anila Quayyum Agha: All the Flowers Are for Me
Ongoing
This luminous installation provides an opportunity to contemplate the differences and commonalities that shape our lives and relationships. Persian and Turkish architecture, textiles and miniature paintings inspire the precise, stylized floral forms that compose Anila Quayyum Agha’s sculptural chamber of light and shadow. This luminous installation provides an opportunity to contemplate the differences and commonalities that shape our lives and relationships.
Learn more about Anila Quayyum Agha here.
Artists in Jingdezhen, China and Peter Wiber. Mounted crow cup, about 1610. Porcelain with gilded-silver. Anonymous gift, 2001. AE85461. Peabody Essex Museum. Photo by Dennis Helmar.
Asian Export Art
PEM’s Asian Export Art collection, foremost in the world, explores cross-cultural exchange as a catalyst for creativity and celebrates the interplay of commerce and creative expression. The gallery features more than 200 works of art made in diverse media by artists in China, Japan and South Asia. These transcultural objects demonstrate the beauty and ingenuity that can be created through blending artistic traditions, materials and technologies.
Learn more about this cross-cultural exchange here.
Korean Art
Explore one of the nation’s earliest and most historically significant museum collections of Korean art and culture. From the late Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) to today, PEM’s exceptional collection explores art, culture and life in Korea during a time of significant transition and global connection. PEM’s Korean Art gallery brings to life the compelling stories of early pioneers, presented alongside the museum’s renowned Korean textile collection, exquisite 19th-century paintings — including the Welcoming Banquet of the Governor of Pyeongan screen — and inspiring contemporary works by Nam June Paik and other Korean and Korean American artists.
Learn more about our Korean Art Collection here.
Japanese Art
PEM’s remarkably long relationship with Japan extends back more than 200 years. Encompassing everyday objects and the fine arts, the museum’s Japanese collection is distinguished for its range, from paintings and sculpture to decorative arts and costumes and textiles. Spanning Hokkaido in the North to Okinawa in the South, and prehistory to the present, these objects illuminate the varied artistic and cultural traditions of Japan. Toward the end of the 19th century, Edward Sylvester Morse, director of the Peabody Academy of Science (a precursor to PEM), became one of the first Western scholars to visit modern Japan after it opened to travelers. Morse was highly influential in encouraging American interest in Japanese art and culture, and helped create this remarkable Japanese collection.
Learn more about our Japanese Art Collection here.
South Asian Art
Explore two linked galleries that follow the thread of South Asian art through a shifting history of occupation and independence. Bridging myth with social and political history, the first gallery tells the story of nation-building and self-discovery through works by India’s most celebrated artistic geniuses of the 20th century. Following independence from British rule in 1947, artists in India aimed to uncover a visual language that was uniquely Indian in inspiration to convey their experiences, struggles, ambitions and dreams.
In the adjacent gallery, visitors find a selection of objects from the museum’s extensive collection of historical material from India. Focused primarily on the 19th century, the gallery considers India’s long and complex history of foreign occupation, and its troubling impact on the representation of Indian people in art. Featuring some of the earliest objects to come to PEM, including unfired clay sculpture, mica paintings and Kalighat paintings, the gallery considers and questions the timeless tropes of India that persist even today.
Learn more about our South Asian Art Colleciton here.
