NEWLY OPENED EXHIBITION

Composite Image: Hiroshi Senju / National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of the artist, in honor of Hiroko Murase, S2025.1.1-2, © Hiroshi Senju (detail); Bingyi / National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Gift of Clara Xing and Theodore T. Wang, S2025.2.1-3, © Bingyi

Into the Waters with Senju and Bingyi: Two Contemporary Paintings

April 2 – September 27, 2026 
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery | Gallery 25

Water is more than subject or inspiration for contemporary artists Hiroshi Senju and Bingyi—it’s a method, a material, and a philosophy. Be among the first to see their paintings, which offer two distinct, hypnotic visualizations of water. Senju and Bingyi reimagine their cultures’ rich artistic traditions with their own bold experiments. Senju reconfigures traditional Japanese painting with contemporary techniques and abstracts real waterfalls into idealized images. Often painting outdoors, Bingyi intuitively channels raw nature but also pulls on historical Chinese ink painting and philosophy. This exhibition puts the artists’ two paintings in context with their unique methods, influences, and ethos. Across three hanging scrolls, Bingyi’s painting bears layers of splashed ink, the sea breeze’s effects, and careful brushwork that conjures a whorl of water and petals. Senju’s folding screens recall the dripping ceramic glazes and waterfall prints in our museum’s collections. By evoking water’s essence, these artists call us to ask: How is nature both permanent and vulnerable? How does water nurture and also destroy? What beauty and mystery can we find in the very resources we rely on? And what happens when we abandon the line between artist and environment? Step into the gallery and feel the power and beauty of water.

To learn more and view the artists’ video, click here.

ASIA WEEK NEW YORK EXHIBITION

Composite image: (top) Vishnu Reclining on the Serpent Ananta (Endless One); Cambodia, Siem Reap province, second half of 11th century; bronze, mercury gilding; National Museum of Cambodia, Phnom Penh; Photograph by Mario Ciampi, © Guicciardini & Magni Architetti / (bottom) Still from the short film Awkun; National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Film by praCh Ly

Vishnu’s Cosmic Ocean

March 7 – September 7, 2026
Blessing Ceremony: Saturday, March 7, 2-3pm
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery | Gallery 22

At the dawn of time, the Hindu god Vishnu slept on a coiled serpent floating in the primordial ocean. There, he dreamed the universe into existence. This magnificent story of creation comes to life through the largest bronze ever cast in Southeast Asia, now on loan to us from the National Museum of Cambodia.

For the first time in centuries, you can experience this sculpture’s full monumental scale: a breathtaking six meters long (nearly twenty feet). Only the head and torso have been displayed since 1936, when the sculpture was found buried in a pit with dozens of loose bronze fragments. A team of international experts has recently conserved and reconnected the body’s remnants after decades of scientific research.

Vishnu’s Cosmic Ocean presents this monumental masterpiece of Cambodian artistry and explores its rich context. Delve into the sculpture’s original island-like temple, the deep blue waters of the surrounding reservoir, and the ancient city of Angkor. Learn about water’s cultural importance as a mirror of the ocean of creation, and admire the exceptional bronze-casting and engineering skills of artists who lived a thousand years ago.

An exclusive film brings you to the present-day reservoir and its surrounding community. Cambodian American director praCh Ly shares a day in the life of a local fisherman, a merchant, and a young Buddhist monk. Titled Awkun (meaning “thank you” in Khmer), this film draws attention to the relationships that bridge sacred and urban spaces, from past to present.

To learn more, click here.

CURRENT EXHIBITIONS

Reasons to Gather: Japanese Tea Practice Unwrapped

April 12, 2025 – April 26, 2026
Tea Presentation: April 19, 2025 from 2-3pm (by registration)
Freer Gallery of Art | Gallery

Japanese tea practice, chanoyu, centers on the appreciation of tea utensils used to prepare and consume powdered green tea, called matcha. Chanoyu elevates these utensils, which include ceramic tea caddies, tea bowls, and hanging scrolls of calligraphy, into objects of aesthetic admiration. The objects in this exhibition accumulated significance over generations through their continued use and display at tea gatherings. Tea practitioners have also cherished the accompanying boxes, documents, and textiles that demonstrate an object’s accrued layers of historical and cultural meaning.

Reasons to Gather: Japanese Tea Practice Unwrapped presents eleven historic tea utensils and accessories, including ceramics, hanging scrolls, boxes, and wrapping cloths. Finding their way from China, Korea, and South Asia into Japanese tea rooms, these objects tell a story of trade and exchange across Asia. This exhibition unveils how chanoyu brought together these different cultural elements through networks of tea practitioners.

The tea utensils featured in this exhibition come from the Kinsey Chanoyu Collection. Gregory Kinsey gifted the museum nearly two hundred objects, a collection that grew from his lifelong devotion to the practice of chanoyu. In an effort to share and uplift the art of tea practice, Kinsey dedicated most of the works to the Freer Study Collection for use in public programs that demonstrate the traditional preparation of matcha. Because of their historical and artistic significance, another sixteen pieces with accompanying provenance documentation entered the Freer Gallery of Art Collection for exhibition and research.

On April 19, witness a public presentation of a traditional Japanese practice of tea preparation, featuring tea utensils from the museum’s collection. Chanoyu is an embodied practice where students learn codified ways of preparing and consuming powdered green tea, or matcha, through in-person instruction from a teacher. This event celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of the Eastern Region USA chapter of the Omotesenke Domonkai, the association of practitioners following the tradition of Omotesenke Fushin-an in Kyoto, Japan.

To learn more, click here.

Knotted Clay: Raku Ceramics and Tea

December 9, 2023 – 2026

Japan’s rich history of ceramic artistry developed in large part alongside the culture of drinking tea. Japanese tea practitioners initially used Chinese and Korean antique ceramics as tea bowls but began using newly made Japanese tea bowls, such as Raku ware, in the sixteenth century. Unlike most tea bowls, Raku ceramics are built by hand—a process described as “knotting clay”—as opposed to using a wheel. Knotted Clay: Raku Ceramics and Tea explores these distinctive, hand-molded ceramics and their close relationship to Japanese tea culture. This exhibition features tea bowls, water containers, and other vessels in the museum’s permanent collection that demonstrate the glazes and forms unique to Raku ware.

Do Ho Suh: Public Figures

April 27, 2024 – April 29, 2029

To usher in the next century of the National Museum of Asian Art, artist Do Ho Suh (b. 1962, South Korea) was commissioned to create a special edition of his work Public Figures to be installed in front of the museum and facing the National Mall in Washington, DC.  Internationally recognized for his large-scale installations, Suh was among the earliest contemporary artists featured in the museum’s groundbreaking Pavilion exhibition series and his work will be the first new sculpture to be installed outside the historic Freer Gallery of Art in over three decades.

ONGOING EXHIBITIONS

The Peacock Room in Blue and White

Ongoing

The Peacock Room is American artist James McNeill Whistler’s (1834–1903) greatest interior. He famously covered this dining room with floor-to-ceiling peacock-inspired designs, including a mural depicting himself and his patron Frederick Leyland (1831–1892) as dueling fowl. Whistler envisioned variations of the peacock and its plumage in blue, green, and gold as the ideal backdrop for Leyland’s prized collection of Kangxi-period (1662–1722) Chinese porcelains. Like Whistler, Leyland collected elaborately decorated blue-and-white vases, plates, and containers from Jingdezhen, China. In the late thirteenth century, Jingdezhen was the world center for blue-and-white porcelain production and export. By the late sixteenth century, the city was exporting porcelains to Europe to satisfy a craze for these wares that peaked again in the 1870s when Whistler and Leyland collected them.

To recreate the room in its Victorian splendor, the museum has installed its collection of Kangxi-period porcelains on the room’s north and east walls (with the fireplace and the windows). We also recently partnered with Jingdezhen potters to fashion reproductions of the collection for the south and west walls. Immerse yourself in the Peacock Room as the Leylands would have 150 years ago.

To learn more, click here.

Feast Your Eyes: A Taste for Luxury in Ancient Iran

Ongoing

The wealth and power of ancient Iran was in part expressed in portable luxury objects fashioned from precious metals and decorated with royal imagery. From the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire in circa 550 BCE to the fall of the Sasanians to Muslim conquerors in 642 CE, Iran played a central role in the history of the ancient world alongside the Assyrian, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine empires. Rulers affirmed their political power through monumental architecture, such as the Achaemenid palace of Persepolis and the towering rock carvings of the Sasanians at Naqsh-i Rustam. They also displayed their wealth and authority through luxury objects fashioned from precious metals and decorated with royal imagery. Silver vessels, including bowls, goblets, plates, and ewers, graced imperial banqueting tables, where they inspired awe and commanded respect in friends and foes alike. Some of the objects were used in elaborate religious ceremonies, and others were sent to far-flung corners of the Persian Empire and beyond as diplomatic gifts and impressive reminders of royal power and generosity. Together these works evoke a highly sophisticated world with an extensive network of military, commercial, and cultural contacts that extended across much of Asia and Europe for centuries.

Japanese Art from the Collection

Ongoing

This exhibition highlights both iconic and lesser-known aspects of Japanese culture through paintings and ceramics from the Freer Gallery of Art Collection. Learn about Japanese art with a focus on the environment, notions of the body, historical crises, and new research findings. Japan’s changing landscapes and local ecologies affected both imagery in paintings and how ceramics were made. Meanwhile, historic crises gave rise to art unique to Japan, such as stoneware repaired with gold (kintsugi) or visual retellings of national stories. Human bodies in art tell us about the emotions an artist wanted to express or the beauty standards of an era. Lastly, analysis of both broken and whole ceramics can give us new insights into how these works were designed, used, and valued.

The works in this exhibition come exclusively from the Freer Gallery of Art Collection, which houses Japanese paintings and ceramics from 3000 BCE to the twentieth century. Our museum’s founder, Charles Lang Freer, donated his collection to the nation in 1906 with the stipulation that the works not be loaned to other institutions or displayed among art from other collections. His gift established our museum and gave the public access to works from across Asia. 

Body Image: Arts of the Indian Subcontinent 

Ongoing

The human body, particularly the beautiful body, is central to artistic expression on the Indian subcontinent. Through the body, artists express fundamental beliefs about the nature of being, social ideals, gender roles, and hierarchies of power, both earthly and divine. The subcontinent, which extends from Pakistan eastward to Bangladesh and from Nepal southward to Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka, has long been culturally and religiously diverse. By grouping and juxtaposing masterpieces from the museum’s collection, this exhibition explores concepts and aesthetics of the body.

Art and Industry: China’s Ancient Houma Foundry

Rediscovering Korea’s Past

Ongoing

Today we admire the translucent gray-green celadon glaze on Korean ceramics of the Goryeo period as one of the great achievements of world potters. In the late 19th century, long-respected tombs of royal figures and nobility from the Goryeo period (935–1392) became vulnerable to looting and were sold in the antiquities market. American doctor and diplomat Horace Newton Allen witnessed this rediscovery while he lived in Seoul from 1884 to 1905, and he formed his own sizeable collection of celadon, it seems, from objects on the open market. Charles Lang Freer purchased Allen’s collection in 1907 and sparked his

deep interest in this distinguished Korean ware. In turn, Allen, Freer, and other early collectors inspired generations of scholars to clarify the styles and dating of Goryeo celadon. Archaeologists have now identified and excavated the kiln complexes at Gangjin and Buan, which produced the finest celadon wares during the Goryeo dynasty.

Afterlife: Ancient Chinese Jades

Ongoing

A construction boom in China more than a century ago resulted in new railways and factories—and the accidental discovery of scores of rich ancient cemeteries. Buried in these tombs for thousands of years were jewelry and ritual objects, all laboriously crafted from jade. When Charles Lang Freer acquired many of them, their precise age was unknown. The modern science of archaeology was not practiced in China until 1928, when the Smithsonian sponsored its introduction. With the advent of archaeology came a better appreciation of the evolution of ancient Chinese mortuary culture and China’s art history.

Today we know these jades represent the earliest epochs of Chinese civilization, the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age. Many came from the prehistoric burials of the Liangzhu culture (circa 3300–2250 BCE). These Stone Age people flourished in a large, fertile region between the modern cities of Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Nanjing. The graves they left behind now function like time capsules, providing insight into the dynamic character of ancient Chinese civilization during life and after death.

Setting the Bar: Arts of the Song Dynasty

Ongoing

China’s Song dynasty established many prototypes in government, society, and the arts. A system of schools and examinations for entering public office led to an efficient, centralized government headed by the emperor but staffed by well-educated commoners. Emerging as a class of scholar-officials, who were both artists themselves and consumers of art, these men looked to ancient tradition as a source for moral principle and creative inspiration. At the same time, a spirit of inquiry and close examination of nature led to advances in art and science. Widespread gains in literacy and disposable income also stimulated growth in the arts. Elegance and refinement in form, line, and color characterize the visual arts of China during the Song dynasty. As new technology enhanced ceramic production and the number of kilns rose, fresh approaches to decoration developed. The rise of ink painting paralleled a taste for monochrome ceramic glazes. A multitude of other painting styles and techniques emerged as well, with a strong preference for realistic detail, modulated colors, and individualized faces and postures.

Wisdom of the Goddess: The Divine Feminine in South Asian, Southeast Asian, and Himalayan Art  

Ongoing Online Exhibition

It is often said that knowledge is power. For the goddesses of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayas, power is closely connected to a particular type of divine wisdom or a state of omniscience, of knowing all things. The wisdom of the divine feminine takes myriad forms in these regions, ranging from healing to artistic skill, and from prosperity to enlightenment. Wisdom of the Goddess highlights nine well-known goddesses of Hindu and Buddhist traditions through twenty-five artworks dating from the ninth through the nineteenth centuries, all drawn from the National Museum of Asian Art’s permanent collections. Many of these representations of goddesses were used by individuals or in temple settings as aids for worship. Some were encountered in manuscripts or worn as necklaces. For devotees past and present, a goddess’s image facilitates a sense of intimate devotion and closeness to the deity.

Prehistoric Spirals: Earthenware from Thailand

Ongoing

Red painted spirals swirl across the surfaces of these vessels, testifying to the sophisticated material and aesthetic cultures of northeastern Thailand more than two thousand years ago. Their makers belonged to a loose network of settlements specializing in bronze and ceramic production. Recent research into their materials, techniques, and designs opens new lines of inquiry into the region’s heritage and its profound cultural and material legacy.

Peacock Room Shutters Open Every Third Thursday of the Month

Ongoing

See the Peacock Room in a whole new light! Please join us for a beloved NMAA tradition: our third Thursday opening of the Peacock Room shutters. Experience this unique masterwork of art and design in a whole new way as natural light reveals details of James McNeill Whistler’s painted interior and accents the gleaming surfaces of Charles Lang Freer’s collection of Asian ceramics.

The shutters are open from noon to 5:30 p.m. every third Thursday of each month.
Free, no registration required.

The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room

Ongoing

The Tibetan Buddhist Shrine Room includes more than two hundred bronzes, paintings, silk hangings, and carpets that were created in Tibet, China, and Mongolia between the thirteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arranged to reflect Tibetan Buddhist concepts and customs rather than museum conventions, the glittering room evokes the Himalayan portals that bridge the mundane and the sacred worlds.

The objects, assembled by collector Alice S. Kandell over many years, are placed on painted furniture, arranged among paintings and textiles, and presented without labels. With an aural dimension of chanting monks, this dynamic and densely layered display restores the relationships between Buddhist figures and viewers that are typically dissolved within museums.

To view all exhibitions, click here.

ONGOING EVENTS

Tours | Arts Across Asia 

Every Thursday through Sunday, and Friday from 2-3pm
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Information Desk

Join a free, hour-long guided tour of the East Building. The tour can feature art from any of the exhibitions currently on view, with works from cultures as diverse as ancient Iran to contemporary Japan.

To learn more and sign up, click here.

Meditation and Mindfulness

Every Tuesday and Friday from 12-12:45pm
Online

Meditation helps us build a relationship to a place of inner quietude. Whether you’re a beginner or a skilled practitioner, join us for free online meditation sessions led by DC-based meditation teachers every Tuesday and Friday. Friday sessions include inspiration from art in the museum collections as well as appearances by special guests, including teachers, curators, and artists. All are welcome! No previous experience is required.

To learn more and sign up, click here.