At the entrance to “Global Asias: Contemporary Asian and Asian American Art from the Collection of Jordan D. Schnizter and His Family Foundation” at the USC Pacific Asia Museum, stand two giant ceramic heads. One features a black-and-white striped neck, red crown and...
Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is known globally for his colorful, smiling flowers, anime-inspired paintings and sculptures, and collaborations in fashion and music. His new exhibition, Stepping on the Tail of a Rainbow, presents an intimate but powerful display of...
The words “origami” and “protest” are rarely used in the same sentence. In recent decades, origami has evolved from simply being a paper craft taught to children in a classroom to help them build their fine motor skills into a sophisticated art form practiced around...
On the weekend before everything locked down in Los Angeles, I was fortunate enough to catch the exhibition "To View a Plastic Flower" at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery and to hear one of the featured artists, Vietnamese American artist T. Kim-Trang Tran,...
Vera Arutyunyan coats her canvases with pigment and passion. For much of her 25-year artistic career, the Armenian-born artist’s bold abstract oil paintings have been expressions of her complex emotions as an immigrant building a new life in the United States. Growing...
In an unassuming location next to a bus station and a shopping arcade in the huge Southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is Vitamin Creative Space, an experimental art space created to engage with contemporary China but “inspired by the confrontation between contemporary...
“There is no one authentic way to present Asian art and culture,” according to Christina Yu Yu, who was recently appointed as director of the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, California. “Once you take a piece of art and place it in a case with a spotlight,” she explains, “you remove it from its original context.” Yu well understands the importance of context. Born in Wuhan in China’s Hubei province, she came to the United States as a student and trained in Asian art history here in the West. It was while in the U.S. that she began to appreciate the art of her own culture. “Sometimes it takes distance” she admits, “to learn about where you are really from.” Her point of view, both Eastern and Western, as well as her academic and professional background place her in a unique position to lead a museum of Asian art in the greater Los Angeles area, where, despite a growing population of transplanted Asians like herself, the art of the East is not widely appreciated.
When Pouya Afshar was a young boy in Tehran, his grandfather gave him a gun and told him to kill the crow that was eating the fruit off the trees in the garden. The young boy did as he was told. Later his grandfather told him the crow might have been a mother feeding...
In many Japanese artistic traditions, from sword making to ceramics, creative techniques have been passed down from generation to generation. Some artists today can boast that they are the 15th generation of an artist family, tracing their roots to the 17th century....
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