New Asian Art Museum Debuts in San Francisco

One of the leading lights of San Francisco’s cultural scene is ready to show off its brand-new home. On March 20 the Asian Art Museum cut the ribbon on its new quarters in the city’s old Main Library in the Civic Center area that also houses the opera house and city hall. For 35 years the museum was located in Golden Gate Park, but its collection had long ago outgrown that facility.

The challenge of turning the 1917 Beaux Arts library into a showcase for the museum’s collection of more than 14,000 Asian art objects was bestowed on architect Gae Aulenti whose reputation soared with his dramatic transformation of Paris’s rundown Gare D’Orsay train station into the widely praised Musée D’Orsay, which houses France’s treasure trove of Impressionist and Postimpressionist art.

It took a $160.5 million fundraising campaign to see the project to completion, with $15 million, the largest single gift, coming from Chong-Moon Lee, a Silicon Valley high-tech entrepreneur. In return for that gift, the museum’s official name will be the Asian Art Museum–Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture.

The new museum’s design preserves the architecturally distinct exterior of the old library and most of the dramatic interior details such as its vaulted ceilings, grand staircase, and skylights.

Visitors enter a first floor that contains exhibition galleries, educational facilities, museum store, and restaurant with outdoor café. The second and third floors, will show off several thousand works from the museum’s collections, which span 6,000 years of history. Among the musuem’s treasures is the world’s oldest known Chinese Buddha, dating from 338.

For the last decade the museum has been committed to increasing its collections of contemporary art, and many of those additions will be on display. The goal of this expansion “is to contribute to an international dialogue about art in our own age and to an understanding of what defines or distinguishes the art being produced by Asians and Asian Americans.”

A special exhibit that will be on display during the APA annual meeting in May explains the ideas and process that went into the design of the new facility.

Another exhibit is “From Monastery to Marketplace: Books and Manuscripts of Asia,” which plays on the theme of the museum’s new home being a former library. It presents, according to the museum’s Web site, “45 examples of secular and religious texts, albums, calligraphy, and manuscripts that highlight the significance of illustrated and written materials in many Asian cultures.”

Visitors who make it back to San Francisco from June through September will be able to experience an exhibit of more than 200 Indonesian rod puppets depicting mythical kings and queens, gods and monsters, and heroes and heroines from Indonesian history and folklore, most based on Hindu and Islamic texts and presented as theater.

The Asian Art Museum is at 200 Larkin St., and is open every day but Monday. Admission is $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $6 for youth aged 12 to 17, and free for those under age 12. The museum’s Web site is www.asianart.org. ▪