Resources: The Asian Art Museum on YouTube

The Asian Art Museum - Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture in San Francisco's Civic Center houses one of the foremost collections of Asian art in the United States and is in fact the largest museum in the United States devoted entirely to the arts of Asia. The museum opened in 1966 with a donation of artworks from the private collection of Chicago industrialist Avery Brundage, who is also known for his tenure as president of the International Olympic Committee from 1952-1972. Over time, Brundage continued to donate works from his collection to the museum; his gifts total over 7,700 objects of the now 17,000 objects strong and growing collection.

Recently, the Asian Art Museum set up its own YouTube channel with videos covering a diverse selection of topics ranging from Chinese calligraphy and Korean ceramics to Buddhist sites in India. The videos are beautifully filmed, narrated by the museum's curators and other professionals and scholars in the field, and are a great way to learn more about Asian art and architecture, art-making techniques and conservation, and Asian religions and history. Some of the videos introduce special exhibits at the Asian Art Museum and are filmed on-site; others are shot on locations in Asia.

The Asian Art Museum's YouTube channel may be accessed here:

http://www.youtube.com/user/AsianArtMuseum

And the website of the Asian Art Museum is located here:

http://www.asianart.org/

Happy viewing!

Resources: Images from the Cultural Revolution

For anyone interested in modern Chinese history, Prof. William Joseph of Wellesley College has established a website with photographs of everyday life in China during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) taken when he was a member of the second delegation of the Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars (CCAS) to China in March-April 1972. The Introduction page gives a fascinating history of CCAS and an account of his experiences during that trip. The resources on the website include numerous links pertaining to the Cultural Revolution, a map of China which links to photographs taken by Prof. Joseph in different cities, and a search engine for the photographs.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was a class struggle initiated by Mao Zedong in order to remove "bourgeois" elements that he saw as promoting capitalism and therefore threatening the socialist base of the Communist Party and the nation at large. During this turbulent period of modern Chinese history, the arts were called into service even as cultural artifacts and sites were being destroyed by the Red Guards. Propaganda posters produced during this time recast the Cultural Revolution and Mao in positive, glowing terms.

For Prof. Joseph's site, go here: http://www.wellesley.edu/Polisci/wj/China1972/main.html
For images of Cultural Revolution propaganda posters, visit the following site established by Stefan Landsberger: http://www.iisg.nl/landsberger/crc.html
and an online exhibition of images hosted by Ohio State University from the 1999 exhibition "Picturing Power:"
http://kaladarshan.arts.ohio-state.edu/exhib/poster/PictPow1.html

Welcome!

Welcome to the Asian Art Library! This blog will be a place to share all things having to do with Asian art, and perhaps ruminations on other art and culture-related topics as well.

To begin with, one of the best internet resources for Asian art is a website called Arts of China Consortium. The website provides a directory of graduate programs in Asian art history in the U.S. and abroad, a list of fellowships and grants, information about lectures and conferences on Asian art, and job listings. To visit the site, go to:

http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/fineart/html/chinese/.