Highlights
‘東海道 Tōkaidō: Dreamscapes by Andō Hiroshige’ at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
The Hiroshige exhibition is a rare treat for enthusiasts of Asian art in Canada. Unlike our American neighbours , who frequently host Asian art exhibitions, Canadian institutions seldom showcase such focused displays.
Exhibition Review: China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta
In the fall semester of 2023, I—and likely every faculty member in North America teaching about the arts of China—had an opportunity to say at least once a week, ‘If you can get to Cleveland before January, you will see this’, referring to one of the more than 240 objects—paintings, metalwork, jade, ceramics, furniture, prints, and calligraphy—on view in ‘China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta’.
Exhibition Review: ‘Art Personalised’ Hong Kong Museum of Art
Some background may be needed to understand the joyful curatorial folie of ‘Art Personalised’, an exhibition on view from 10 November 2023 through 7 April 2024 at the Hong Kong Museum of Art (HKMOA). Under the direction of Maria Mok Kar-wing, the museum has pursued an unabashedly populist strategy since it reopened in Tsim Sha Tsui in December 2019, after four years of expansion and renovation.
The Kathmandu Triennale 2077
The Kathmandu Triennale 2077, presented 1–31 March 2022, was the fourth edition of Nepal’s premier international platform featuring local, national, and global contemporary art. Organized by the Nepal Ministry of Culture, Tourism, and Civil Aviation and the Siddhartha Arts Foundation, along with Para Site in Hong Kong, the Triennale discarded the Gregorian calendar for its title in favour of the Nepali Bikram Sambat alternative calendar date of 2077.
More than seventy local, national, and international nonprofit organizations, government entities, corporations, media sponsors, and individuals helped make the Triennale become a reality. Under the leadership of the curatorial team consisting of Cosmin Costinas, Sheelasha Rajbhandari, and Hit Man Gurung, the Triennale featured more than 300 artworks created by 130 artists from forty countries on display at five culturally and historically significant Kathmandu venues. English and Nepali texts accompanied all exhibition artwork, and extensive public programming was held at each location, including performances, workshops, and lectures.
Featuring a wide selection of art practices and approaches, the Triennale included performance, installation, photo, slide, and video art; mixed-media, print, acrylic, oil, tempera, and ink painting; and traditional folk art, painting, sculpture, and textiles, offering visitors unique insights into local, national, and global issues.
‘Matthew Wong: Blue View’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Canada, 13 August, 2021–18 April, 2022
The first non-commercial exhibition of the paintings of the late Hong Kong–Canadian artist Matthew Wong (b. 1984, Toronto–d. 2019, Edmonton), ‘Blue View’ at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), displays the most recent works made by Wong before his untimely death by suicide. A protean image maker, Matthew Wong painted inventively in oil and gouache, mobilizing a vast knowledge of Euro-American and East Asian painting that far surpassed the sources he noted in interviews (for example, Vogel, 2022). Wonderfully, the AGO exhibition, organized by the museum’s chief curator Julian Cox, presents Wong’s paintings without over-interpreting them: the catalogue text and didactic materials in the galleries are brief. These laconic statements permit Wong’s paintings, which reward close looking, distant views, and repeated encounters, to be seen for their considerable technical strengths.
‘Renaissance Venice: Life and Luxury at the Crossroads’ at Gardiner Museum, Toronto 14 October 2021–9 January 2022
After a year-long delay as a result of the ongoing global pandemic, the much-anticipated exhibition ‘Renaissance Venice: Life and Luxury at the Crossroads’ finally opened at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. Founded in 1984 by the philanthropists George and Helen Gardiner, the Gardiner Museum is Canada’s only museum that specializes in ceramic art. The major pieces in the permanent collection range from ancient American sculpture, Italian majolica earthenware, European court porcelain, a well-published collection of Japanese export art, and Chinese Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) period porcelain.
Perspectives of/from India in Salem: The Peabody Essex Museum’s Indian Art Galleries
When one thinks of India … Salem, Massachusetts is not likely the first thing to come to mind. And yet, the port city served as a vital node in the transoceanic trade networks of the 18th and 19th centuries, connecting the newly independent United States of America to important trading centres in India, China, Japan, Zanzibar, and other regions across the globe. Today, the collection of the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) serves as a visual testament to the city’s legacy of global connectivity.