The Asian Art Museum first opened its doors in 1966 and was built on the collection of Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage, who wanted to make San Francisco “one of the world’s greatest centers of Oriental culture.” Nearly 50 years later, the institution has grown significantly, moving to stately new digs in the heart of San Francisco’s Civic Center, just next door to City Hall. The museum is mostly known for showing historical and traditional work from a variety of Asian regions, but that is all changing with a new institutional mission to show more contemporary art, as well as work that doesn’t necessarily find its origin in Asia.
Director Jay Xu said that the museum will show non-Asian art more often in the future. “Our museum’s new artistic vision calls for it,” he explained. “We aim to explore Asia’s global relevance and spark connections across cultures and through time with art experiences that inspire new art, new creativity, and new thinking. These efforts support our new artistic vision. We believe Asia is for all, Asian art is for all.”
With that mission in mind, the museum has stepped outside its comfort zone for an unorthodox summer exhibition titled “Gorgeous.” The show, which runs through September 14, presents a spectrum of objects that might be described as gorgeous and in the process seeks to provoke the audience to wrestle with the term for themselves. Bridging 2,200 years and dozens of cultures, the sundry objects in the show were sourced from the Asian Art Museum’s collection and that of SFMOMA, which is currently closed for renovations, as part of the latter’s On the Go offsite programming.
The exhibition is part of a strategy to appeal to new audiences and comes complete with a Barbra Streisand-inspired hashtag: #hellogorgeous. Xu acknowledges that the show is trying to bring in younger people, but calls them “low-hanging fruit.” “I hope that it also draws more mature audiences, ones who might be accustomed to more traditional fare,” he said. “If they come, and enjoy it, then I think we’ve definitely succeeded.”
The museum’s galleries are filled with unlikely bedfellows. Items like an erotic Tom of Finland drawing that depicts two muscled men literally bulging out of their pants, from SFMOMA’s collection, sits in a room with a Japanese silk Noh robe covered in an elegant flower pattern, from the Asian Art Museum. Elsewhere, Jeff Koons’s marble bust “Self-Portrait” from 1991 (also currently on view in his Whitney retrospective) is steps away from a statue of the Buddhist deity Simhavaktra Dakini, dated 1736-1795. There’s even a first generation iPhone on display. Co-curators Forrest McGill and Allison Harding admit that the show is a gamble.
“Certainly the museum has been wanting to find opportunities to experiment with various approaches and to take some risks,” McGill said. “Definitely this one was a risk for us because some of our core audience isn’t very interested in international modern and contemporary art. Things like taking this very subjective approach, having a degree of playfulness, having the labels all signed by either Allison or me, and having them in very personal voices — all of that stuff we’d never done before. We wanted to try it.”
Eschewing political or theoretical context, the curators wrote highly informal wall labels that offer up personal reflections on the works and are signed with their names. They also designed the catalogue to look like a fashion magazine.
“It felt very vulnerable for us to share our personal reactions to objects that you could write books and books about from a scholarly perspective, but I think what it’s done is make unfamiliar objects seem less intimidating to people,” Harding said. “You have to keep in mind, we are talking about two very different audiences coming together. The show is so diverse that something is going to be unfamiliar to everybody. To give people a way in and to model that behavior of ‘I just looked at this object for a long time and this is what occurred to me,’ I think that is giving people the confidence to approach objects in a very open way.”
So far, in terms of attendance at the museum, it seems that the risk has paid off. “We’re about one third through the run of the show, and we’ve drawn more than 20,000 visitors,” Xu said. “Attendance can vary between season and an exhibition topic, but attendance for ‘Gorgeous’ is outpacing last summer’s exhibition of Japanese masterworks from the collection of Larry Ellison by 30 percent.”
Going forward, the museum plans to continue to explore connections between East and West. Next year, it will borrow masterworks from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts for an exhibition titled “Monet to Matisse: Japan and Western Masters.”
“As Asia’s world influence grows, so does the importance of understanding the cultures of this diverse and vast region,” Xu said. “The Asian Art Museum is ready to help facilitate that understanding.”
