The Rise and Rise of Asian Art

It's the middle of the day, and i'm in a large room in a warehouse district of Queens, N.Y., where I'm beating a pair of heavy sticks against animal skins. The skins are stretched like drumheads over the seats of a couple of old chairs, a stool and the odd bed frame. These "drums" are then suspended from a timbered support that fills most of the room. As everyone knows, pounding on stuff is fun, which may explain why all around me there are people banging their own chairs and bed frames, plus one or two security guards who don't look all that happy about being stationed here. Did I mention the enigmatic bowl filled with rocks that hangs in the center? O.K., you guessed. I'm at an art exhibit.

Three years ago the Chinese artist Chen Zhen died at 45 after a years-long struggle with an autoimmune form of anemia. The work of his last years is the subject of a moving show this month at P.S. 1, the Museum of Modern Art affiliate in Queens. Jue Chang Fifty Strokes to Each, from 1998, is typical of Chen's mix of Chinese traditions and modern-art formats, in this case a massive installation work. The title refers to a Buddhist maxim--50 blows to both opponents in any conflict. That's supposed to be a way for them to acknowledge and then settle their differences. It's just days before the invasion of Iraq, so believe me, I'm drumming.

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Is this art? Nearly four decades of installation and performance pieces have answered that question. Art is anything that happens in an art gallery, plus a whole lot that happens elsewhere. Is it Asian art? Absolutely, and especially because this is the work of a man born in Shanghai who relocated to Paris in 1986 and spent his final years everywhere. Everywhere is exactly where Asian art is these days, particularly in the U.S., where it appears at last to be claiming real space for itself among the Van Goghs, Picassos and Warhols.

This week 10 or more sizable exhibitions devoted to Asian art are under way or about to open in American museums. There are Himalayan bronzes and paintings in Chicago, Mongol ceramics and carvings in Los Angeles, and Japanese animation figures in West Palm Beach, Fla. If you go online before March 29, you can snag a fair example of Totalitarian Kitsch at the Sotheby's/eBay auction of Maoist artifacts www.sothebys.com ). At last glance, $172.50 would get you three red plastic badges with cameo silhouettes of the Great Helmsman. And when the new and improved Peabody Essex Museum reopens in June, it will feature on its grounds an early 19th century Chinese merchant's house, which the museum has moved in its entirety from the Huizhou region near Shanghai to Salem, Mass.

The Puritans, who saw the devil's hand in almost anything foreign, would have run for their torches. But if they saw the U.S. museum calendar these days, they would not have known where to run next. Immigration has produced larger Asian-American communities all over the country, which have not only heightened the demand for their cultural patrimony but also produced the prosperous donors and collectors who slap the money down for the shows. Add to that the opening up of China over the three decades since Richard Nixon's visit, a process that has made more Chinese work available while allowing younger Chinese artists to travel and make a name for themselves.

Asian art had a foothold in the U.S. as early as the 18th century, when blue and white Chinese porcelain was a mark of wealth and taste in households, like Thomas Jefferson's, that could afford it. Commodore Matthew Perry's arrival in Tokyo Bay in 1853, which forced Meiji Japan to open itself to Western influence, led to a concurrent craze in Europe and the U.S. for all things Japanese. By the turn of the century Ernest Fenollosa and William Sturgis Bigelow, learned Bostonians infatuated with Japan, were assembling the great collections of furniture, scrollwork, carvings and prints that now fill whole galleries of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

But it no longer requires the enthusiasm of a few artists and intellectuals for Chinese scrollwork and Korean statuary to make their way across America. In San Francisco last week, the Asian Art Museum celebrated the opening of a sizable new home in the city's former main library, a 1917 neoclassical building reconceived by Gae Aulenti, the Italian designer who updated the Musee d'Orsay in Paris. It's no mystery why the largest American museum devoted to Asian art should be located in a city where some 40% of the population is of Asian descent, chiefly Chinese and Philippine, but including Indian, Pakistani, Lao, Vietnamese and Korean too. "We also know all of the 30 Mongolians in the Bay Area personally," says Emily Sano, the museum's director.

That community provides both demand and enhanced funding power. Ten years ago, when the museum was in difficult straits, Chong-Moon Lee, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur born in Seoul, was invited to lunch by South Korea's consul general in San Francisco, who told him the museum desperately needed $1 million to stay afloat. "The consul general was crying," Lee recalls. "Then I started crying. I was so emotional, I wrote him a $1 million check on the spot." Two years later, when the museum set out to raise money for its new, $160 million home, it began with a $15 million gift from Lee.