Rubin Museum Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room; Photo: Dave De Armas, courtesy Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art

Rubin Museum Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room
June 11, 2025 – April 20, 2031
Members Evening: Thursday, June 26, 7-9pm
200 Eastern Parkway, Arts of Asia Galleries, 2nd Fl

A lamplit sanctuary amid the bustle of Brooklyn—and a refuge in uncertain times—the Rubin Museum Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room is a place to learn, reflect, and seek inspiration. Opening June 11 at the Brooklyn Museum, the installation presents more than 100 artworks and ritual objects as they would be displayed in an elaborate household shrine, where devotees make offerings, pray, and meditate. Scroll paintings (thangkas), sculptures, furniture, and musical instruments dating from the 12th to 20th century are carefully arranged according to Tibetan Buddhist tradition. Chanted prayers by monks and nuns reflect the ritual practices and remind visitors that Buddhist rituals engage all the senses. The design incorporates elements of Tibetan architecture and the color schemes of traditional Tibetan homes, offering visitors the opportunity to experience Tibetan religious art in its cultural context.

More than one million people experienced the Shrine Room when it was exhibited in its original location, the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art in Manhattan, from 2013 to 2024. To ensure New York City residents and visitors can continue to enjoy this space, it has been given a new home at the Brooklyn Museum. The immersive installation will welcome guests within the Arts of Asia galleries for six years. A virtual exploration of the Shrine Room will allow visitors worldwide to enjoy this evocative sanctuary from home.

Brooklyn Museum Members and Friends of the Rubin are invited to a special evening celebrating this new installation on June 26. Curators of the Shrine Room and the Arts of Asia galleries will be in attendance to offer insights into the works on view. To register, click here.

To learn more, click here.

Installation view, Sun and Silver: Early Photographs of China by Lai Fong and John Thomson

Sun and Silver: Early Photographs of China by Lai Fong and John Thomson
Closing Tuesday, June 10, 2025
10 West 18th Street, 7th Floor
Open by appointment

Don’t miss your chance to experience this landmark exhibition, bringing together masterworks by two towering figures of 19th-century photography in China, Lai Fong and John Thomson, on view at The Loewentheil Photography of China Collection through June 10!

Lai Fong, the most celebrated early Chinese photographer, and John Thomson, his prominent foreign contemporary, each played a pivotal role in shaping the early artistic and technical development of photography in China. Curated by Stacey Lambrow, this major exhibition gives viewers the opportunity to compare and contrast Lai Fong’s expressive artistry and technical ingenuity alongside Thomson’s stylistic virtuosity. This show reveals the intricate and fascinating relationship between the works of these two photographers who crossed paths, competed for patrons, and had a meaningful influence on one another and the art of photography.

Sun and Silver: Early Photographs of China by Lai Fong and John Thomson spans the careers of both artists through the finest examples of vintage prints, all dating to the 1860s and 1870s. It also presents works by other 19th-century photography studios in China that share the themes and subjects of Lai Fong’s and Thomson’s photographs. The exhibition suggests new ways of looking at the origins of photography in China.

This exhibition presents a tiny sliver of the holdings of the Loewentheil Collection, the most important collection of early China photographs in the world.

To learn more and schedule your appointment, click here.

Courtesy of Ellen Peng

Ginza Curator’s Room #012
Piercing Through a Porous Archive
June 6 – 28, 2025
Shibunkaku Ginza, Ichibankan-Building, 5-3-12 Ginza, Chuo-ku, Tokyo

For their 12th edition, Shibunkaku’s Ginza Curator’s Room presents their first-ever co-curated exhibition, welcoming Osaka Koichiro, director of the project space ASAKUSA, and Guo Jau-lan, Associate Professor at Taipei National University of the Arts.

To learn more, click here.

Installation view, Bian Kai: Conjuring Realities

Bian Kai: Conjuring Realities
On view through August 17, 2025
Red No. 1-B1, Caochangdi, Chaoyang District, Beijing

INKstudio is proud to present Bian Kai: Conjuring Realities, the first solo exhibition for the Liaoning-born visual artist Bian Kai (b. 1981). In his contemporary painting practice, Bian Kai draws extensively upon China’s rich mythological, philosophical and religious narrative traditions referencing classical texts—such as the Warring States Era Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Six Dynasties Peach Blossom Spring and the Tang Dynasty Buddhist Canon A Biography of The Tripiṭaka Master of the Great Ci’en Monastery—to render modern parables for our contemporary times. Using the various historical, heavy-polychrome, visual-narrative languages employed in Buddhist and Taoist temple murals, Tibetan Buddhist thangkas and Chinese imperial court painting, Bian Kai visually reconstitutes the mythological, religious content of his source material but never in a direct retelling or portrayal of the canonical story or image. Rather, in what he describes as painting as “performance” yan 演 or art(ifice), he transforms the canonical telling to conjure a “truth” zhen 真 for his audience that is both transcendent and personal.

The exhibition features the artist’s representative masterworks from the last ten years including (on the first floor) Next Stop: Peach Blossom Spring 下一站桃花源 (2024) from his “City” series; the monumental screen The Unbound Journey 逍遥 (2022) from his “Wandering Far and Wide” series; and its companion work Cosmography of the Primordial 山 · 海 (2020) from his “Mountains and Seas” series; and (on the third floor) The Shore of Enlightenment 慧岸 (2018) from his “Religions” series; and the left-incomplete, six-panel work Peach Blossom Spring: Arcadia as Unfinishable 未完成的桃花源 (2016) from his “Peach Blossom Spring” series.

The exhibition will be up for over ten weeks and will function as an open research workshop where Bian Kai will collaborate with graduate researchers Nancy CHU from Stanford University and Chuxin ZHANG from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, the curator Deng Feng from the National Art Museum of China, and others to excavate and record the many layers of historical, philosophical, religious, literary and mythological content resident in his extraordinary conjured realities.

To learn more, click here.

Suzuki Sansei (b. 1936), Round Celadon Vase, 1990s, porcelain with celadon glaze, 12½ x 15½ in. (31.8 x 39.4 cm)

Japanese Ceramics: Medieval to Contemporary
Through June 13, 2025
8 East 67th Street, NYC

Thomsen Gallery warmly invites you to visit their new location at 8 East 67th Street for the inaugural exhibition, Japanese Ceramics: Medieval to Contemporary, on view now through June 13.

This special ceramics exhibition is devoted to a key part of the Japanese aesthetic tradition that is as dynamic today as it was 10,000 years ago. The show features an extraordinary range of works, from 14th-century stoneware vessels to contemporary porcelain by acclaimed artists, including two Living National Treasures.

They are open Monday through Friday, 11am to 5pm, so be sure to visit them to experience the timeless beauty and craftsmanship of Japanese ceramics firsthand.

To learn more, click here.

Utagawa Hiroshige 広重 (1797-1858), Lake at Hakone はこねの湖すい, series: Thirty-six Views of Mt Fuji 富士三十六景 (Fuji sanju rokkei), date: 4/1858

This spring, Egenolf Gallery Japanese Prints is excited to share their latest arrivals of exquisite prints focusing on 19th and 20th century landscapes after completing a buying trip to Japan!  In appreciation of the British Museum’s special exhibition Hiroshige: Artist of the Open Road (on view through September 7), they will be posting works by Hiroshige and Hiroshige II in the coming weeks, as well as shin hanga works by Kawase Hasui, Oda Kazuma and Kasamatsu Shiro.

A captivating example is a beautifully preserved print by Utagawa Hiroshige seen above. The unmistakable and symmetric cone of Mount Fuji rises clear and strong above the mists as seen from Lake Ashinoko (also known as Hakone Lake) in the resort area of Hakone. Not a soul is in evidence, nor signs of  human habitation, as our view features green hills atop gentle yellow cliffs. This scene is probably almost the same today, as the area remains very lightly developed. Bright yellow clouds lie just beyond Mount Fuji, so this may likely be a morning view.

Kawase Hasui (1883-1957), Morning In Beppu 別府の朝, 1922, series “Selection of Scenes of Japan”

Another thrilling work is this unusually scarce, pre-earthquake design by Kawase Hasui. An informal fish market seems to be taking place, with a man in an apron holding up what looks to be a tuna. Other villagers gather on the beach, probably inspecting wares that were freshly delivered by the nearby fishing vessels. The small boat at left may be a ferry vessel.  The morning sun is still a bright yellow, glowing behind the mountains. As Narazaki wrote: “Villagers and boat passengers gather along a coastal dune. This is the first work by Hasui that deals with a group of people, whose small forms in this composition are beautifully portrayed. A few fishing boats compose the middle ground, the spa town of Beppu and the faraway mountains are silhouetted in a purplish blue.” Beppu is one of Japan’s most famous hot spring resorts, home to more than two thousand onsen. This view seems to be from Mochigahama Beach; although the view from the sand looks much the same, urban sprawl seems to have completely covered most of the flat lands between the mountains and the sea, and this rural view that could be from hundreds of years ago has captured a charmingly pre-industrial scene that has largely disappeared. From a limited edition, verso, numbered “nine” from an edition of 300 prints.

New treasures are added daily, so visit often and uncover something inspiring each time!

To view the latest prints, click here.