Current Exhibitions at Seattle Asian Art Museum
A Beautiful Despair (Blue), 2021, Anila Quayyum Agha, Pakistani-American, b. 1965, lacquered steel and halogen bulb, 60 x 60 x 60 inches, Courtesy of Sundaram Tagore Gallery, NYC, the artist, © Anila Quayyum Agha, photo: Steve Watson/Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, TX.
Anila Quayyum Agha: Geometry of Light
August 27, 2025 – April 19, 2026
South Gallery
Anila Quayyum Agha: Geometry of Light invites you to become part of the art. Agha, a Pakistani American artist, animates spaces with her large-scale sculptural installations. Suspended from the ceiling, Agha’s steel cubes are laser-cut with intricate designs that project geometric shadows onto the visitor. She draws on both the light and dark of her own life, using South Asian art practices to convey the gender discrimination she faced growing up as a young girl in Pakistan. An in-depth exploration of Islamic architecture, art, and identity, this is the first solo exhibition of a Pakistani American artist in SAM’s 90-year history. Agha is carving a name out for herself in the art world—visit the Seattle Asian Art Museum for an immersive and illuminating experience.
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Water Lilies, 2022, Ai Weiwei, Chinese, b. 1957, LEGO bricks, 105 1/2 x 602 3/4 in., Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio and neugerriemschneider, Berlin, © Ai Weiwei, photo: Marjorie Brunet Plaza.
Ai Weiwei: Water Lilies
March 19, 2025 – March 15, 2026
At nearly 50 feet in length and made from 650,000 LEGO blocks, Ai Weiwei’s Water Lilies (2022) is the artist’s largest and most ambitious LEGO work to date. This reinterpretation of Claude Monet’s iconic triptych from the Museum of Modern Art in New York offers an equally immersive experience, merging the lush beauty of Monet’s water lilies with Ai’s personal history.
Visitors can experience this work—displayed in one long panel on a single wall—up close in the immersive space of an intimate gallery at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. This is the first time this work has been shown in the US; it debuted in 2023 in Berlin at the Neugerriemschneider Gallery.
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The Kondō Family: Storytellers in Clay
July 15 2025–January 3 2027
Boundless: Stories of Asian Art
February 8, 2020 – Ongoing
Asia can be defined in many ways, geographically, culturally, and historically. As the world’s largest and most populated continent, Asia is not uniform or fixed: its boundaries shift, its people and cultures are diverse, and its histories are complex. After a transformative renovation, the Seattle Asian Art Museum—one of only a few Asian art museums in the United States—reopens with a presentation that embraces this complexity. You will not find galleries labeled by geography. Instead, works from different cultures and from ancient to contemporary times come together to tell stories about Asia in a non-linear narrative.
The galleries are organized around 12 themes central to Asia’s arts and societies such as worship and celebration, visual arts and literature, and clothing and identity. The south galleries feature art inspired by spiritual life and the north galleries show art inspired by material life. Some objects relate to both the spiritual and material realms and are a testament to art’s layered meanings.
Each artwork tells its own story of when, where, how, and why it was made. But when seemingly disparate artworks are displayed together, meaningful connections and questions emerge. Explore our renowned collection and discover ideas across time and across Asia.
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Current Exhibitions at Seattle Art Museum
Ash-Glazed Ceramics from Korea and Japan
July 9, 2025 – July 12, 2027
This exhibition brings together 34 ceramic artworks featuring ash glaze, all drawn from the Seattle Art Museum’s remarkable holdings of Japanese and Korean art. Spanning time, place, and function, the selection includes ancient Korean funerary and ritual gray wares, ancient Japanese Sue and Sanage wares, early medieval Japanese Seto wares, and large storage jars from medieval and contemporary Japan.
Exchange with peoples of the southern Korean peninsula led to the introduction of a variety of advanced technologies to the Japanese islands during the Kofun period (ca. 250–538). In the realm of pottery, highly skilled Korean makers brought both knowledge of the potter’s wheel and the technical expertise needed to create a new type of kiln now commonly known by the Japanese term anagama.
Built into a hillside with a fire fueled by wood at the lower end and a flue at the higher end, the anagama kiln fires pottery at around 1200–1400 degrees centigrade (2200–2500 F). Prior to this in Japan, pottery was fired in open or partially open trench kilns, reaching only around 800 degrees centigrade. As in Korea, the higher firing temperature resulted in stronger vessels, which replaced lower-fired wares as the standard for ceremonial and ritual purposes after the 400s. This firing environment also led to the development of natural, or “accidental,” ash glazes, created when wood ash in the kiln collects on the vessels, creating a glaze that appears greenish-yellow to deep green, sandy to glossy, and dripping to charred. Ash glazes inspire artists around the world to this day.
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Chronicles of a Global East
October 20, 2022 – Ongoing
By land and by sea, the premodern global world was deeply interconnected. This exhibition narrates a few of the many stories related to the Silk Roads and maritime routes, where innumerable transnational artistic traditions emerged. A monumental deerskin map provides a commanding view of Tainan, a port city with Dutch-built fortresses and Chinese and indigenous residents. In a reversal of Chinoiserie, an imperial mirror shows Chinese palaces set within a pastoral European landscape. The blue-and-white ceramics on view recall Chinese porcelains but are in fact inventive Vietnamese commercial wares whose profitable path to market was interrupted after their transportation was shipwrecked. Each appropriation represents a claim of advantage—whether over strategic territory, in artistic and technological sophistication, or business innovation. Each also embodies curiosity, a desire for new knowledge through borrowing from the unfamiliar “other.”
This exhibition is made possible by:
Taiwan Studies Arts & Culture Program, University of Washington
University of Washington East Asia Center
Lucie Tuan In honor of Yuyann Hu and Enlei Tuan
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UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
Map of the History of Science and Technology (detail), Qiu Zhijie, Chinese, b. 1969, ink on paper, dimensions variable, photo: Courtesy of the artist.
Qiu Zhijie: Map of the History of Science and Technology
January 28, 2026 – January 31, 2029
Olympic Sculpture Park
For the Seattle Art Museum’s Olympic Sculpture Park, the artist designed a Map of the History of Science and Technology. In this project, Qiu interweaves scientific and technical advancements in Asia and the West from ancient to contemporary times. The map calls out the discovery of bronze and iron, the invention of the wheel, the abacus and mathematical and scientific theorems, the plow, celadon ware, Roman cement, paper making, feats of engineering across the globe, as well as the bicycle, photography, acupuncture, the flush toilet, and more. The map traces the interconnectedness of ideas that have shaped the course of history across the globe.
Born in 1969 in Zhangzhou, Fujian Province, China, Qiu Zhijie is a leading figure in conceptual art and new media. Trained in traditional calligraphy, he is celebrated for imaginary maps in which he turns milestone developments in philosophy, sociology, art, culture, and science into topographic equivalents of a memory palace. Initially creating works small in scale, he gradually adapted the format to large-scale wall installations.
Graduating from the Department of Printmaking at the Zhejiang Academy of Arts (now China Academy of Art), Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, in 1992, Qiu was instrumental in developing the school’s Department of Intermedia Arts. Since 2024, Qiu has served as the President of the Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts.
To learn more, click here.
Samantha Yun Wall: What We Leave Behind
February 5 – October 4, 2026
Seattle Art Museum (SAM)
Samantha Yun Wall’s new paintings use overlapping silhouettes of female figures as portals to unknown spaces and different temporal realms. Impetus for the new body of work is a Korean folk tale in which the Pasque flower is symbolic of a grandmother who passed away without the loving care of her grandchildren. It is a story of melancholy, loss, and remembrance. The delicate hair on the flower’s stem differentiates it, and the artist gives the plant a surreal aspect in some of her paintings, replacing the flower’s center with a watchful eye.
Yun Wall has long been interested in the personal narratives of people born to Asian women and US service members during times of military occupation in Asia. The artist is mindful of the fact that these Amerasian children are stigmatized and Black Amerasians even more so. Examining cultural taboos that perpetuate secrecy and silence, she presents her figures alternately as invisible and hypervisible in stark black and white.
In past work, Yun Wall drew on ghosts, monsters, healers, and storytellers—from Korean folklore as well as science fiction—to deconstruct and reframe the stories of outcasts in dynamic compositions. While her interest in these figures continues, her new paintings and drawings have a probing and introspective quality. Wall’s silhouettes puncture time and space, allude to past and present, and point to what remains unsaid or unknown.
Samantha Yun Wall (b. 1977, Seoul) is the 2024 Betty Bowen Award winner. Established in 1977 to honor the legacy of Betty Bowen—an enthusiastic supporter of Northwest contemporary art—the annual award celebrates a Northwest artist for their original, exceptional, and compelling work.
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Ai Weiwei: Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze)
Coming 2026
Olympic Sculpture Park, North Terrace
Standing over 10 feet tall and weighing over 1,500 pounds per piece, Ai Weiwei’s Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze) (2010) consists of 12 zodiac head sculptures. These remarkable works will be installed in the Ackerley Meadow, an area of the sculpture park just outside of the PACCAR Pavilion. They will be arranged in an arcing semi-circle and in order of the traditional Chinese zodiac cycle: Rat, Ox, Tiger, Rabbit, Dragon, Snake, Horse, Ram, Monkey, Rooster, Dog, and Boar. Visitors can get up close and walk among the sculptures.
The works reconceive 12 zodiac heads that once decorated an 18th-century Qing imperial fountain before they were looted during the Second Opium War (1856–1860). Seven are based on the original heads that have survived, and Ai researched and reimagined the five animals still missing to complete the zodiac. This work embodies Ai’s long engagement with questioning the tendency to value the real over the fake and the original over the copy.
Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads (Bronze) will be on view along with 22 monumental sculptures throughout the Olympic Sculpture Park, including The Eagle (1971) by Alexander Calder, Wake (2002–03) by Richard Serra, and Seattle Cloud Cover (2006) by Teresita Fernández. Seattle’s largest green space, the nine-acre sculpture park is free and open daily from 30 minutes before sunrise to 30 minutes after sunset.
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