Skip to main content
Celebrating Asian Art   

ASIA WEEK

NEW YORK

Asian Art News

Eternal Offerings: Chinese Ritual Bronzes
A Special Exhibition Designed by Oscar-Winning Artistic Director Tim Yip

March 13, 2023

China, Asia, Gui food vessel, 11th century BCE, Bronze, Bequest of Alfred F. Pillsbury, 50.46.8

March 4–May 21, 2023
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday-Sunday: 10am-5pm
Thursday: 10am-9pm
General Admission $20;
Contributor Member+ Free (additional tickets $16);
Youths 17 and under Free

Used to make offerings to heavenly and ancestral spirits, bronze vessels held great ritual significance in ancient China. Mia’s Chinese art curator Liu Yang and renowned Oscar-winning art director/film designer Tim Yip (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) have created an immersive experience to engage the senses featuring 150 bronze objects from Mia’s collection. Lighting Design by A.J. Weissbard.

This is an exhibition of dualities: light and dark, ancient and present, heavenly and earthly.  Ritual and ceremony maintained the rigid hierarchy that flowed from the heavens to the king, and from the courts to the people. Each of seven galleries embodies a facet of the rituals enacted to honor the divinities, from the solemnity of the temple, to the intoxication of lavish banquets, and the progression leads you into a world where art collides with the aesthetics of theater and film.

You arrive into a world of wildness, featuring bronze birds, tigers, and mythical beasts. This liminal space represents animism, shamanism, divination, and the worship of gods and ancestors, where no division between the human and the divine exists.

You depart surrounded by still pictures and 3D scans of the intricate surface ornamentation of various bronze vessels, offering an even closer look at these mysterious but significant motifs. Intact objects set on a mirror correspond to the bronze shards seen in the first gallery, a metaphor for completion of the spiritual journey through “Eternal Offerings.” The illusion created by the mirrors also hints at the impact of modern Chinese archaeological excavations, which make possible the reconstruction of an ancient history shrouded in the mists of memory.

Though each room is its own production, they are sequential and thematic, stages of a full ritual ceremony. A soundscape, dramatic lighting, dazzling projections, and painted images animate each multisensory space.

• • •

Kicking off Asia Week across channels

March 10, 2023

Clockwise from bottom left: Hamza and His Men Attacked by a Sea Creature, Mughal style at Bikaner, India, circa 1680, opaque watercolor and gold on paper, folio measures 9 7/8 x 6 1/3 in., painting: 9 x 5 1/2 in., Cho Yong-Ik (b. 1934), 69-521, 1969, oil on canvas, 25 x 21 in. (64 x 53.3 cm.)⁠, Wood Figure of Shō Kannon with polychrome pigments and gold leaf, Heian period circa 1100, H. 18 1/2 in. (47.1 cm.), formerly Kōfuku-ji, Nara, Half Palampore with Mythical Animals and Mughal Flowers; India, for the Indonesian market (detail); Cotton; block printed and painted mordant and resist dye; 40 x 94 in. (102 X 239 cm.), Ganesh Haloi, Untitled 3, 2021, gouache on handmade paper laid on board, 21 x 30.25 in.⁠

Galleries specialized in works from several parts of Asia

HK Art and Antiques
Figures and Flowers
March 17-April 6
49 E 78th St, Suite FB
New York, NY
This exhibition includes of modern and contemporary Korean paintings by Kim Sou, Kim Hyungguen, Su Kwak, Kyung-ja, and Cho Yong-lk among others. The gallery also features a group of Goryeo celadons from a private collection in the United States, including various celadon oil bottles and bowls.

Online Exhibitions

Akar Prakar
Ganesh Haloi: A space left behind
Online, ongoing
D-43, First Floor, Defence Colony, New Delhi 110024 India (with an additional Kolkata location)
Ganesh Haloi (born 1936) has been based in Kolkata since 1950, following the partition of India. Like other artists of his generation, the trauma of displacement left its mark on his work, exhibiting an innate lyricism coupled with a sense of nostalgia for a lost world.

Kaikodo
Safety in Numbers
Online, March 16-March 23, 2023
The Big Island, Hawai’i location, 27-760 Old Onomea Road, P.O. Box 68, The Big Island, HI 96783
Numbers manifest in various ways across Chinese and Japanese art. Whether in a series or as part of a broader collection, Kaikodo explores the idea of strength in numbers in their impressive showcase, which includes 16th and 17th century painting and decor.

Thomas Murray
The Art of Shell Beads and Recent Acquisitions
Online and March 16-22, Park Lane Hotel, 36 Central Park South (by appointment)
New York, NY
Shell artwork and garments from Taiwan, the Philippines and northeastern India feature in this academic showcase, addressing the origins of shells for status from at least 35,000 years ago, and the bead trade industry which endured from two thousand years ago through the 20th century for many ethnic groups of Southeast Asia and Oceania. Recent acquisitions including several rare and unique textiles from India made for the Indonesian market will be featured.

Art Passages
The Fabled Lands: Persian and Indian Paintings
Online and by appointment in New York
3450 Sacramento St Unit 216 San Francisco CA 94118
Shawn Ghassemi and his team bring a number of impressive watercolors with gold and silver on folio spanning the 17th through 19th centuries in India and modern-day Iran.

• • •

Ippodo Gallery celebrates 15 years in New York

March 8, 2023

In March 2023, Ippodo Gallery celebrates 15 years in New York City.

Founded by Keiko Aono in 1996 in Tokyo, Ippodo Gallery has remained devoted to the appreciation of Japanese culture and tradition through exquisitely crafted, high-quality artwork. Ippodo Gallery Tokyo is now located both in the heart of Ginza and a quiet residential area Gotenyama, with tea ceremony rooms where many artists and friends gather and foster connections. Keiko Aono built Ippodo Gallery through a specific kind of trust and love found in human relationships, and as a result, Ippodo Gallery has worked directly with over 200 artists and held thousands of exhibitions over the decades.

Today, Ippodo Gallery in New York is overseen by Keiko-san’s daughter, Shoko Aono, a pioneer in presenting Japanese Kogei art, including ceramics, lacquerware, bamboo, woodwork, metal, textiles, glass, painting, and photography among other media. The New York gallery space opened in 2008, and continues to bring meaningful Japanese art, experience, and hospitality to a Western audience.

Ippodo Gallery honors traditions in life and presents a gratitude for nature. Immersed the world of Japanese reverence, they bring a contemporary sensibility by closely working with living Japanese artists, through a belief that life is an art form itself. The gallery mission is to share empathy and conversations with the world through the experience of Japanese culture.

Ippodo has an Asia Week New York showcase on ‘Iridescent Lacquer’ by Terumasa Ikeda.

• • •

The Wonder Unbound at the Korean Cultural Center New York

Opening Reception: March 15th, 6-8pm
On view March 15th – April 27th, 2023
460 Park Avenue, 6th Floor, NYC 10022

The Korean Cultural Center New York (KCCNY) is pleased to present The Wonder Unbound, an exhibition examining modern and contemporary Korea through the images and texts from multidisciplinary books published in foreign countries in the late 1700s to 1960s, authored by by non-Korean missionaries, diplomats, soldiers, to historians, art historians, and explorers who visited or worked in Korea.

A curated selection of 120 rare and vintage books from the collection of Professor Seung-Chul Lee are open to public view for the first time, selected from his personal collection of 1,350 for their multi-dimensional reflection of life in Korea. Professor Seung-Chul Lee is Director of the Dongduk Women's University and a renowned Hanji (Korean traditional paper) artist himself.

These valuable texts bring to light varying perspectives and observations on Korean culture, economy, daily life, and notably, bring an added point of interest to the discourse as they are published in the author’s original language after they had returned from their travels abroad.

Changing visual materials reflect meaningful historical shifts, from illustrations, to black and white photography, and ultimately to color photography. A lot has changed in the world since their publication, but they are undoubtedly invaluable in the artistic insights they provide about Korea and its place geopolitically, historically, and culturally. The visual representations in this exhibition aim to act provide academics and researchers with a different perspective and offer a new approach for Korean studies.

To learn more, click here.

• • •

Closing today: Last chance to see Eccentric Vision at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery

Joanne Carson, Untitled (Study for Sculpture), 2006, mixed media on paper, framed 23 3/4 x 19in (60.4 x 48.3 cm), signed “Carson 2004” recto

Today marks the closing of Eccentric Vision: Works on Paper from a Private Collection, at Miyako Yoshinaga Gallery. 20 works on paper from the 1970s to the 2010s celebrate nontraditional techniques and artistic visions, such as self-taught and outsiderart, gender identity, and humor.

⁠ ⁠

Boston-based collector Karen Moss prides herself on open mindedness and eccentric choices, including those by artists Kiki Smith, Marc Bell, Tony Fitzpatrick, Jose Barboza-Gubo, Joanne Carlson, Sue Coe, Marcel Dzama, Neil Farber, Mary Frank, Frances Hamilton, Susan Te Kahurangi King, Andrew M. Roczek, Jennifer Perry, Nusra Quereshi and Tara Tucker among others. ⁠

Moss developed an interest in Outsider Art as a natural evolution after being exposed to European Art Brut, the Prinzhorn Collection and the establishment of the Outsider Art Fair in New York in 1993. The works have greatly enriched the life and home of the collector and now she hopes to share them with a wider audience.

To learn more, click here.

• • •

The Nelson-Atkins Museum offers Artist Hours at Found in Translation: Explorations by 8 Contemporary Artists

Hong Chun Zhang (Born in China, working in the United States, born 1971). Continuity, 2022. Chinese ink on Alcantara fabric with scrolls, 240 × 58 inches. Courtesy of the artist. Photo © 2022 The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

March 10, 2023 5:30-7:30p.m.
Kirkwood Hall
Drop in, no tickets required

Many things risk being ‘lost in translation,’ but what about being found? In this showcase, the Nelson-Atkins Museum explores the skilled visual artists who converting ideas and questions into art, with art being discovered and ‘found’ through this process of change and transformation. This is the second exhibition in KC Art Now, which celebrates local artists, informed by their individual experiences with immigration from places across Asia to Kansas City.

On March 10th from 5:30-7:30pm, anyone is invited to drop in and meet the artists featured in the show—Noriko Ebersole, Shreepad Joglekar, Priya Kambli, Kathy Liaowill, Yoonmi Nam, Hyeyoung Shin, Heinrich Toh, and Hong Chun Zhang—who will discuss their artistic processes. View images and tools of their work and hear how they make choices about media and techniques.

Recordings are also available for previous artist conversations about memory and identity.

Artist Hours are organized by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Generous support for the exhibition is provided by Linda Woodsmall DeBruce and Paul DeBruce, and the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.

To learn more, click here and here.

• • •

Find Asia Week galleries on our interactive map!

For Asia Week 2023, Asia Week New York has updated our interactive map to find all galleries, independent dealers, museums, and auction houses at their open house locations. They are categorized by shape and color, based on type of business and subject matter. The dealers are numbered, and the auctions and museums are lettered.

For those institutions who will not be exhibiting in New York, their states-wide and international locations also appear. As such, the map not only serves the local tour of the March showcase in Manhattan and the neighboring locations, but can provide a broader resource for pertinent member exhibits elsewhere.

To view the map, click here.

For a different viewing experience, there is also a downloadable pdf version of the map. The telephone numbers of those exhibiting online only are listed for inquiries.

To view or download the pdf, please click here.

• • •

None Whatsoever: Zen Paintings from the Gitter-Yelen Collection at the MFA Houston

Ito Jakuchu, Giant Daruma, late 18th century, hanging scroll; ink on paper, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Gitter-Yelen Collection, gift of Dr. Kurt Gitter and Alice Yelen Gitter.

Through May 14, 2023
Tickets included with general admission here.

None Whatsoever features masterworks of Zen Buddhist Japanese paintings from the renowned New Orleans–based collectors Kurt Gitter and Alice Yelen Gitter spanning more than four centuries, complemented by selections from the MFAH collection of modern and contemporary art, with work by Franz Kline, Takahiro Kondo, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and Hiroshi Sugimoto, among others.

Zen paintings represent one of the world’s most fascinating religious and artistic traditions. None Whatsoever explores the origins of Zen Buddhism in Japanese painting through ink paintings and calligraphies by painter-monks, such as 18th-century Buddhist master Hakuin Ekaku, who expressed Zen Buddhist teachings through their art.

The exhibition takes its title from an 8th-century legendary encounter between itinerant monk Bodhidharma, and Chinese Emperor Wu Liang. When the emperor asked how much goodwill his generous deeds had earned in the eyes of the Buddha, the monk’s curt reply, “None Whatsoever,” shocked the ruler. This seemingly casual exchange has come to embody the revolutionary relationship in Zen Buddhism between student and teacher.

On view until May 14, 2023

generous support is provided by:
Luther King Capital Management
E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation
Anne and Albert Chao
Mitsubishi Corporation (Americas)
Eddie and Chinhui Allen
Mr. and Mrs. Russell M. Frankel
Kathy and Glen Gondo
Milton D. Rosenau, Jr. and Dr. Ellen R. Gritz
Miwa Sakashita and Dr. John R. Stroehlein
Nanako and Dale Tingleaf

• • •

Are you ready for Asia Week?

March 3, 2023

Clockwise from bottom left: Fine and rare pair of Qingbai glazed vases and covers, Southern Song dynasty, circa 11th/12th century, Ralph M. Chait Galleries; The lion and the guardian dog, Kamakura period, 13th century, wood, Hiroshi Yanagi Oriental Art; and Hasegawa Chikuyū (1885-1962), Deep in the Woods (detail: right side of a screen pair), 1920s, pair of two-panel folding screens, ink, mineral pigments, shell powder and gold wash on silk, Thomsen Gallery

Chinese and Japanese art galleries are gearing up to exhibit exceptional works this month for Asia Week New York.

Ralph M. Chait Galleries, Inc.
Spring Collection of Chinese Porcelain and Works of Art
March 16-24
16 East 52nd Street, Suite 1002
New York, NY
35 notable objects include a remarkable pair of Large Famille Verte Vases and Covers with relief decoration, Kangxi period and numerous other fine objects and figures, many with important provenance. A fine group of Porcelain Production watercolors juxtapose with a Japanese porcelain figure.

Thomsen Gallery
Japanese Art 1910-1940
March 16-24
9 East 63rd Street, Floor 2
New York, NY
This period was one of great change for Japan’s arts, featuring experimentation with new materials and perspectives. Accompanying bamboo baskets and intricate gold lacquer boxes from the Taisho and Showa eras will highlight technical perfection.

Hiroshi Yanagi Oriental Art
Selection of Japanese Art: New Acquisitions
March 17-24
Nicholas Hall
17 East 76th Street – 4F
New York, NY
This veteran Kyoto-based dealer offers a wide selection of 13th, 17th, and 18th century works from Japan, including a Kamakura period set of lion and guardian dog figures and a stunning ink and color on silk scroll of Phoenix and Jurōjin, an auspicious figure believed to offer longevity.

• • •

Calling the Soul: the Rhapsody of Taihang⁠ at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Bingyi (Chinese, born 1975), The Eyes of Chaos: Remaking the Song Palace, 2021–22. On loan from the artist.

Calling the Soul: the Rhapsody of Taihang⁠,
Philadelphia Museum of Art
In person event, Saturday, March 4th, 11am-12pm⁠
Seating is first come, first serve⁠

A performance alongside works by Bingyi is held in junction with Oneness: Nature & Connectivity in Chinese Art, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The showcase and its accompanying programs are made possible by The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Global.

Based between Beijing and Los Angeles, artist Bingyi creates and talks about a new work of art responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. Bingyi directly engages nature and the environment in her creative process, which spans the categories of ink art, land art, and performance.⁠ Her monumental immersive ink installation The Eyes of Chaos was created in the mountains of Henan province during the pandemic and is currently on view in the Chinese Reception Hall, Gallery 326, in our exhibition Oneness: Nature & Connectivity in Chinese Art.

• • •