Looking East

Asian Art Museum of San FranciscoI went to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco this week because I’m interested in the art and I love the building.  

To be honest, I find Asian art intriguing but a little exotic and hard to relate to.  Even living in very pan-Pacific California, I feel like I don’t really “get” so-called Asian culture. 

At least I now know to say “so-called Asian culture,” because I read this graphic when I first walked into the museum:

"Asia is a term invented by Greeks and Romans, and developed by Western geographers to indicate the land mass east of the Ural Mountains and Ural River, together with offshore islands such as Japan and Java. Culturally, no "Asia" exists, and the people who inhagit "Asia" often have little in commn with each other.

But the building!  It’s not a new building designed to look “Asian,” but an almost 100 year old Beaux Arts civic classic.  Built as the public library soon after the 1906 earthquake in the new Civic Center, the building was transformed in 2003 to house a huge art collection from 40 countries (18,000 objects, largest museum of Asian Art in the west.)  The architect, Gae Aulenti, also led the transformation of the Quai D’Orsay train station in Paris into an amazing art museum – she specializes in such repurposing of old buildings.

I wrote here last spring about another repurposed building, a California country club that became a research lab and then later a church. I wondered then, as I did this week at the museum, what remains of a building’s past when its purpose is changed?  In the reconstruction, what should be kept, as heritage or inherently essential, and what can or should be changed?  

When the museum building was a library it had some Art Deco murals that many people loved, but they were deemed incompatible with the building’s new purpose.  The plan was to destroy them, but at the last minute they were moved across town to the European art museum.

I wonder, do buildings have souls, and do they remember their past?  Does the library building next door look across Hyde St. to its modern successor building in confusion or affection?  Does the grand staircase, with all the inspiring quotes above it, about how reading ennobles the soul, think – Where did all the books go?

Hirochige’s Kyobashi BridgeI made the trip to the city because I wanted to see an exhibit called “Looking East: How Japan Inspired Monet, Van Gogh and Other Western Artists.”   Created by Boston’s Fine Arts Museum, this lush collection of paintings by Monet, Renoir, Cassatt, Pissarro, Munch, Gauguin and many more, Frank Lloyd Wright chairs and Tiffany desk sets and kimonos and turn of the century magazine layouts argues for the deep influence of Japanese prints and style and culture on Western art from 1860-1910. Works from different continents are hung side by side to show the influence of east on west. 

MonetIt was good to be reminded how these western artists of a century ago whom we have enshrined were very open to new perspectives and subject matter and technique.  Indeed they were hungry for it, stifled by convention and the academy’s traditional requirements.  The diplomatic opening of Japan to the west opened up creative spirits as well, of artists across Europe and American.

In the same way that my spirits were opened up last week.  After seeing, for one example, how Utagama Hirochige’s Kyobashi Bridge influenced Monet’s painting of a bridge at Giverny, (where he had his own collection of 200 Japanese prints) I went upstairs to see the permanent collection.  I immediately felt a connection and artistic appreciation of Asian images that I had not had before. 

I had acquired, thanks to the special exhibit, a set of “museum eyes,” my phrase for the new way of seeing that comes after intense time with art.  For an hour or so after you leave the building, everything looks like art.  For me, after looking at western art that I was somewhat familiar with, through the lens of Japanese art, the permanent collection’s prints and screens and swords and ceramics came alive as art, not interesting historical or anthropological artifacts, as I had sometimes limited them before.

Museums give you that little sticky tag to wear to prove you’ve paid, and at the Asian, it has an upside down A on it.  All the employees have shirts with the same skewed letter.  The website says they chose this as their logo and symbol to make the point that this is a new way of looking at Asian art, a new perspective.

Indeed, housing this collection from another continent in a classic western building forces this new perspective, turns the A upside down.  Both the art from a thousand years before the building, and the contemporary avant garde works all ultimately overshadow the building, which too is forced to look east.

I saw the A in a new way also, with my own (museum) eyes and my own heart.  The artwork said to me: Open up, turn up side down.  By looking east.  Or in my case, west (as the building also faces) across the Pacific, to those 40 countries we call Asia.

Copyright © 2016 Deborah Streeter