Spring Into Art at Asia Society Museum
Now on view in New York
This spring, the exhibitions at Asia Society include thought-provoking contemporary sculptures wrestling with the violence of war, monumental modern Indian painting from a founder of the Progressive Artists' Group, exquisitely detailed maps and objects tracing the 18th-century convergence of China and Europe, and masterpieces of the ancient world from the Asia Society Museum Collection. Keep an eye on our site for events, lectures, and symposia related to the artworks on display, and don't forget that the museum is open late and free to attend every Friday until 9 p.m.
In Focus: A Complete Map of the World—The Eighteenth-century Convergence of China and Europe
This small, focused exhibition uses one of the rare prints of Ma Junliang's map of the world (Jingban tianwen quantu) as a starting point to consider the interaction between China and Europe during the eighteenth century. The map offers viewers a Chinese perspective about power and the nature of the world with China at the center. The exhibition also includes Chinese eighteenth-century artworks that appropriate and reinterpret European images and techniques.
Reza Aramesh: 12 noon, Monday 5 August, 1963
Reza Aramesh examines the power imbalance between captor and captive and the aestheticization of violence in media coverage of wartime atrocities. The exhibition will focus on Aramesh’s series of limewood sculptures inspired by seventeenth-century Spanish Christian iconography of martyred saints. His models, predominantly young, non-European male subjects, exude a homoerotic sensibility that adds a charged religious and sexual dynamic within representations of violence and evokes the military practice of sexual humiliation as a form of torture.
Masterpieces from the Asia Society Museum Collection
This exhibition features a selection of the finest artworks from the renowned Asia Society Museum Collection. Included are Chinese, Korean, and Japanese ceramics; Indian and Cambodian sculpture; and sculptures from South and Southeast Asia and the Himalayas that show the varied imagery associated with the transmission of Buddhism across the region.
M.F. Husain: Art and the Nation
One of the founding members of the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, M.F. Husain created the mural-sized painting Lightning for then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Congress Party public rally in 1975 in Bombay (Mumbai), the same year that a state of emergency was imposed across India. The twelve massive panels of Lightning are littered with visual references to India and the 1970s, and though absent visually, to Indira Gandhi.
Photos from the members' reception for In Focus: A Complete Map of the World—The Eighteenth-century Convergence of China and Europe, Reza Aramesh: 12 noon, Monday, 5 August, 1963, and Masterpieces from the Asia Society Museum Collection. To learn more about joining Asia Society as a member or patron, click here.
