Asian Art

Works from this collection are on view on the Museum's third floor.

The Museum has been collecting Asian ceramics since the 1920s, when Judge E.B. and Margaret Crocker's daughter Jennie Crocker Fassett donated her collection of Korean ceramics and other East Asian objects. The ceramic collection has since grown to include Chinese tomb furnishings, trade ceramics (particularly the Hiroko Hara and Shigeharu Takahashi collection), and Japanese tea ware. Fassett's donation of decorative arts also initiated the acquisition of Japanese armor and Chinese jades. 

More recently, the Museum has added to its holdings artwork from South and Southeast Asia, a direction inspired in part by gifts of Southeast Asian sculpture and decorative arts from Doris Duke's Foundation for Southeast Asian Art and Culture. These acquisitions grant a glimpse into the role of Buddhism from Pakistan to Southeast Asia, and demonstrate how the regional diversity of Buddhist art is connected by a common vocabulary of belief. Hindu works from South and Southeast Asia complement the Buddhist works in exploring the rich religious traditions and cultures of the region.

Due to the light-sensitive nature of two-dimensional objects in the Asian collection, such works need to be rotated regularly, enabling a variety of small thematic exhibitions presented in the Angelo and Sofia Tsakopoulos Gallery of the William and Edith Cleary Collection of Indian and Persian miniature paintings. A sampling of 20th-century Chinese paintings from Sandra and Franklin Yee, Japanese prints, Chinese and Japanese textiles, and Tibetan rugs are also on view and rotated regularly.