Ren Yi, Demon Queller, Zhong Kui, 1882, ink and color on paper, 65 ½ x 30 ¾ in.
The Clyde and Helen Wu Collection of Chinese Painting, Gift of Dr. Clyde Wu

The Gallery’s collection of Asian art comprises nearly 8,000 works from East Asia, South Asia, continental Southeast Asia, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey and spans the Neolithic period to the 21st century. Highlights of the collection include Chinese ceramics and paintings, Japanese paintings and prints, and Indian and Persian textiles and miniature paintings. Examples from the collection are now on view in three exhibitions through November 2022.

Understanding an Eighteenth-Century Indian Album
This exhibition brings together several manuscript pages featuring exquisite paintings of musical modes, given to Yale in 1939 and 1940. The display locates their production in late 18th-century northern India and presents a selection of textiles and ceramics similar to those illustrated in these pages.

Chinese Painting between War and Revolution, 1830–1950
This show highlights the vibrancy and experimentation with Western and Japanese visual traditions that characterized Chinese painting during the tumultuous period between the Opium War (1839–42) and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Sakura: Cherry Blossoms
Celebrating the varied rendering of cherries in paintings, woodblock prints, lacquer, and metalwork, Sakura: Cherry Blossoms explores the longstanding Japanese fascination with the beauty of this delicate blossom as a symbol for the ephemeral nature of life and its pleasures.

In addition, the recent gift Rain Washes the Body, Enlightenment Cleanses the Soul (2017), a painting by contemporary Korean artist Kim GuGu, is temporarily shown with stone and bronze sculpture from Asia’s multifaceted religious traditions. These less fragile sculptures, together with ceramics and metalwork objects from across Asia, remain permanently on view.

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