This year’s 15th anniversary, Year of the Dragon edition of Asia Week, opening March 14, is a kind of mini-fair in which out-of-town Asian art galleries converge on New York, auction houses gavel in Asian antiquities and local galleries and museums mount special shows. It is an exciting occasion for aficionados of Japanese cat demons (Egenolf Gallery Japanese Prints) and Vietnamese celadon (Zetterquist Galleries), but it’s also a great opportunity for aesthetes steeped mainly in Western art to broaden their horizons. (Please note that while some exhibits go on into the spring, others last only the week. Check the website before visiting.)
Koho Kajiwara’s maroon bamboo “Peony Basket,” at TAI Modern, has a gorgeous, tear-drop-shaped handle several times taller than the basket itself, and Thomas Murray is showing an Ainu robe over a century old whose white-on-indigo patterns go back centuries further. Two cheerful porcelain brothers horse around in brightly colored tunics at Ralph M. Chait Galleries, Inc., and a company of aristocratic Chinese women, including the Empress Dowager Cixi, appear in a rare showing of 19th-century photographs by the Loewentheil Photography of China Collection.
In its 20th anniversary year — and last Asia Week before its scheduled close this fall — the Rubin Museum has asked 30 contemporary artists to dive into the Himalayan tradition with the exhibition “Reimagine: Himalayan Art Now.” The Korea Society has iridescent mother-of-pearl inlays by Jian Yoo, the Korean Cultural Center New York has a retrospective of John Pai, who worked at the intersection of textiles and mathematics and the Japan Society has an invigorating roundup of Zen painting. And there’s no time like the present to visit the Brooklyn Museum’s “Porcelains in the Mist: The Kondo Family of Ceramicists,” which focuses on a proprietary glazing technique that uses silver droplets.
Asia Week New York
March 14-22, various locations, asiaweekny.com
