Society for Asian Art Newsletter for Members November - December 2019 No. 6

Don’t miss the special exhibition, Chang Dai-chien: Painting from Heart to Hand, which opens on November 26, 2019! Here are some highlights.

Left: Landscape of Waterfalls and Overlapping Peaks, 1951, by Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian; Chinese, 1899-1983). Hanging scroll; ink and colors on paper. Asian Art Museum, The Yeh Family Collection, 2007.114. Photograph © Asian Art Museum.

Center: The Drunken Dance, 1943, by Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian; Chinese, 1899-1983). Hanging scroll; ink and colors on paper. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gift of Murray Smith, M.91.213. Photograph © Museum Associates/LACMA.

Right: Splash Waterfall, 1968, by Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian; Chinese, 1899-1983). Framed panel; ink and colors on paper. Lent by Kathy and Paul Yih. Photograph © Asian Art Museum.

The Society for Asian Art is a support organization for the IN THIS ISSUE

Saturday, November 9 Member Event - Chang Dai-chien: California’s Modernist Master Society for Asian Art Saturday, November 16 November - December 2019, No. 6 Member Event - How the Indian Ocean Spice Trade Made the World Modern Members’ Newsletter Edited by John Nelson Sunday, December 8 and Susan Lai Member Event - Annual Holiday Celebration Published bimonthly by Society for Asian Art Fridays, January 24 – May 8 200 Larkin Street Spring 2020 Arts of Asia Lecture Series San Francisco, CA 94102 Visions of the Afterlife in Asia www.societyforasianart.org (415) 581-3701 Sundays, January 26, February 9, February 23, March 8 & March 22 [email protected] Spring 2020 Literature and Culture Course The Literature of Soviet Central Asia with Emily Laskin Copyright © 2019 Society for Asian Art Board of Directors 2019-2020 Friday, October 16, 2020 - Sunday, November 1, 2020 Travel President Trista Berkovitz Moroccan Crossroads: Mosques, Medinas and Mountains Vice President Margaret Edwards Vice President Ehler Spliedt Secretary Etsuko Kobata Treasurer Ed Baer UPCOMING EVENTS (subject to change) Edith Benay Margaret Booker Saturday, January 18, 2020 Lynne Brewer Member Event - Awaken with Jeff Durham Deborah Clearwaters* Kalpana Desai Tuesday, February 4, 2020 Gloria Garaventa Kirk Gibson Member Event - Society Roadshow at Bonhams Thomas Ihrig Nancy Jacobs Phyllis Kempner Peggy Mathers WELCOME TO NEW MEMBERS Forrest McGill* Lawrence Mock Howard Moreland John Nelson We would like to welcome the following new members, who joined the Pamela Royse Society in August and September. We are thrilled that you have decided Kathleen Slobin to join us, and hope you find our programs and events interesting and Nazneen Spliedt engaging. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions and give us feedback. Marsha Vargas Handley Welcome! Diane Weber Sylvia Wong Kasey Yang Annette Abbott Ken & Susan Kawaichi Catherine & Eric Crystal May Loo *ex officio Andre Goforth Anne Sandlund Randall Ham & Linda Wilford Julia Verzhbinsky Betsy & William Houston Keith Weed & Julia Molder Elaine James Lou Williams

2 ARTS OF ASIA SPRING 2020 LECTURE SERIES

Visions of the Afterlife in Asia

Left: Snuff bottle with a scene of Demon Queller Zhong Kui expelling evil ghosts, approx. 1800–1900. China; Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, Qing dynasty (1644–1911). Porcelain with underglaze blue decoration. Asian Art Museum, Gift of Richard P. Arens, 2010.426.a-.b. Photograph © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

Right: The night journey of the prophet Muhammad on the heavenly creature Buraq, approx. 1800. India. Opaque watercolors on paper. Asian Art Museum, Gift of Shawn Ghassemi, 2007.13. Photograph © Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

When: Fridays, January 24 – May 8 (No lecture on March 27 and May 1.) Time: 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Place: Samsung Hall, Asian Art Museum Fee: $175 Society members; $200 non-members for the series (after museum admission) $20 per lecture drop-in subject to availability (after museum admission) Instructor of Record: Sanjyot Mehendale, UC Berkeley

After our popular fall 2019 lecture series on the lesser-known religions of Asia, we expand our scope to explore beliefs about the afterlife and divine justice across Asia and view how different communities and religious traditions observe the passage of life to afterlife.

Please join us on a journey that will start with some of the earliest known traditions of Mesopotamia, the Abrahamic traditions, study ancestor worship in China, examine ideas about reincarnation across Asia, look at heavens and hells on the Silk Road, examine the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and follow the Night Journey of the prophet Muhammad. Distinguished scholars will address beliefs and practices from the Ancient Near East, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Far East. The variety of beliefs is as broad as human imagination. Come hear about ghosts and spiritual beings from different traditions as well as burial customs of the Chinese diaspora during the 19th and 20th centuries.

January 24 March 13 Dying While Living and Living While Dead: Themes Across Asian Pure Land, Hell, or Emptiness? Buddhist Visions of the Hereafter on Afterlife Beliefs the Silk Road Christopher Moreman, CSU East Bay Michelle McCoy, University of Pittsburgh

January 31 March 20 The Descent of Ishtar and the Epic of Gilgamesh: Afterlife in Early Navigating the Afterlife Through the Tibetan Book of the Dead Mesopotamian Traditions Jacob Dalton, UC Berkeley Niek Veldhuis, UC Berkeley April 3 February 7 Beyond Life as We Know It: The Wondrous and the Monstrous in The Art of Reincarnation in South Asian Religious Traditions Japanese Notions of the Afterlife Melia Belli Bose, University of Victoria Mark Blum, UC Berkeley

February 14 April 10 Visions of the Afterlife in the Bible and Dead Sea Scrolls Afterlives and Afterworlds in the Islamic Garden Ron Hendel, UC Berkeley Nerina Rustomji, St. John’s University

February 21 April 17 Gods, Ghosts, and Felicitous Writing: Visions of the Afterlife in On Corpses, Ghosts, and Amulets in the Funerary Culture of Thai Ancient China Buddhism Jun Hu, UC Berkeley Justin McDaniel, University of Pennsylvania

February 28 April 24 The Road to Hell: Buddhist Visions of Naraka at Qizil Traveling Between Worlds: The Afterlife of Art and Ritual in Indonesia Sanjyot Mehendale, UC Berkeley Kaja Maria McGowan, Cornell University

March 6 May 8 Korean Traditions of the Afterlife If You Are Remembered, You Still Exist: The Bone Repatriation of Michael Pettid, SUNY Binghamton Chinese Immigrants Summer Mei Ling Lee, Artist

3 LITERATURE AND CULTURE SPRING 2020 COURSE

The Literature of Soviet Central Asia With Emily Laskin

When: Sundays, January 26, February 9, February 23, March 8 & March 22 Time: 10:15 a.m. to 12:15 p.m. Place: Koret Education Center, Asian Art Museum on 1/26, 2/23 & 3/8 Community Room, Opera Place on 2/9 & 3/22 Fee: $115 Society members; $140 non-members (after museum admission)

Central Asia has been a cultural crossroads for millennia but for much of the twentieth century, while the region was part of the Soviet Union, little information about its people or its culture reached the West. At the same time, under Cup with calligraphic inscriptions, 1440–1460. Probably Uzbekistan; Samarqand, Timurid communism, new ways of life and thought developed in Central Asia: literature in period (1370–1507). Nephrite. Asian Art local languages flourished, and new ideas about socialism and equality mixed with Museum, The Avery Brundage Collection, B60J619. Photograph © Asian Art Museum of older forms of Central Asian culture, producing a unique body of fiction and San Francisco. memoir. In this course, we’ll start with two different takes on Soviet Central Asia in the 1930’s: the Russian Andrei Platonov, who saw the region as a tabula rasa where socialism could be built from scratch; and Langston Hughes, who visited and found an analogue to the American south. Then we’ll work our way through the twentieth century, with texts by Sadriddin Aini, Chingiz Aitmatov, and Hamid Ismailov, through which we’ll explore the modern and ancient history of this complex region.

Emily Laskin is finishing her doctoral degree in UC Berkeley’s Department of Comparative Literature, where she teaches Russian and English literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. She works in English, Russian, and Persian and her writing focuses on the literature of borderlands and regions where multiple linguistic and literary traditions coincide.

MEMBER EVENTS

Chang Dai-chien: California’s Modernist Master With Mark Dean Johnson

When: Saturday, November 9 Time: 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Place: Koret Education Center, Asian Art Museum Fee: $15 Society members; $20 non-members (after museum admission) Waterfall on a Lofty Cliff, 1960–1970, by Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian) is recognized as the 20th century's greatest Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian; Chinese, 1899-1983). Framed panel; ink and colors innovator of Chinese painting, who lived in California for a decade. Chang's work on paper. Crocker Art Museum, Gift of The was featured in the Asian Art Museum's first solo exhibition of the work of a living Chinese Collection of Sandra and Franklin artist in 1972, so the history of the museum and the artist are intertwined. The Yee, 2005.94.2. exhibition, Chang Dai-chien: Painting from Heart to Hand, that opens in November is the Asian Art Museum's second solo exhibition of works by the artist and features many works that the artist gifted to the institution.

Mark Dean Johnson is Professor of Art at San Francisco State University. He is a principal editor of books, including Asian American Art: A History, 1850-1970 (Stanford University Press, 2008), and co-curator/editor of Chang Dai-chien: Painting from Heart to Hand. He is the co-curator of Changing and Unchanging Things: Noguchi and Hasegawa in Postwar Japan, currently on display at the Asian Art Museum until December 8, 2019, with catalog and related reader published by the University of California Press.

4 MEMBER EVENTS

How the Indian Ocean Spice Trade Made the World Modern With Eric Tagliacozzo When: Saturday, November 16 Time: 10:30 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Place: Koret Education Center, Asian Art Museum Fee: $15 Society members; $20 non-members (after museum admission) Nutmeg mace The quest for spices brought the world together in ways that we only now recognize. Though spices have been in circulation since antiquity, it really was roughly from the "Contact Age" forward (circa 1500 CE) that they began to play a vital role in connecting the world's scattered societies. Prior to that, the Mediterranean Basin and India were thinly connected by spices; further to the east, India and Southeast Asia as well, as were Southeast Asia and China further east. It was, after all, spices that Columbus was looking for when he "found" the New World instead, so we are in some senses the result of his quest for the former, as we sit here in the latter. The barks and seeds of Asia ended up launching the beginnings of the imperial age, when European state-making projects under the guise of "East India Companies" eventually carved up much of the known world. We will follow this process and learn a bit about the objects of this unparalleled affection—the spices themselves—along the way. We take the seasonings on our dinner tables for granted, but we shouldn't. What could be more prosaic? Yet these commodities are one reason we are all here together, talking in the New World about voyages in the Old World long ago.

Eric Tagliacozzo is Professor of History at Cornell University. He is the author of “Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier” (Yale, 2005) which won the Harry Benda Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, and more recently of “The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and the Pilgrimage to Mecca” (Oxford, 2013). He is also the editor or co-editor of ten other books, including the “Asia Inside Out” trilogy from Harvard University Press. He is the Director of the Comparative Muslim Societies Program (CMS), as well as Cornell’s Modern Indonesia Project (CMIP), and serves as editor of the journal INDONESIA.

Annual Holiday Celebration

When: Sunday, December 8 Time: 1:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. Place: Richard Gervais Collection and Living Green Design, 1465 Custer Avenue, San Francisco Fee: $50 Society members; $65 non-members

We are delighted to once again stage SAA’s holiday festivities at the fabulous Custer Avenue galleries anchored by Richard Gervais Collection and Living Richard Gervais Collection Green Design. This sumptuous space has something for everyone. Richard’s pan-Asian showroom is chockablock with every kind of unique artifact imaginable from furniture to sculpture, ceramics, textiles, basketry, jewelry, and more. Living Green Design delivers a synthesis of world class artifacts and design components that span cultures and centuries, set among a spectacularly curated collection of outdoor plants and indoor foliage. Richard Gervais, Davis Dalbok of Living Green Design, and the Morgan Oakes Gallery, specializing in tribal art, are all mounting special holiday displays of smaller objects appropriate for holiday gift giving. So don’t leave your wallets at home!

Bring your appetites to enjoy a light Asian-style meal prepared by Richard’s superb caterers. Street parking is abundant. Weather permitting, we will be able to wander the vast and splendid outdoor garden area, so dress warmly. A good time is guaranteed. Living Green Design 5 TRAVEL

Save the Date! Moroccan Crossroads: Mosques, Medinas and Mountains October 16 - November 1, 2020 Come to the Kasbah! Join Trevor Marchand, Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at SOAS University of London, for an unforgettable journey through the profusion of sights and sounds of this fascinating country of extraordinary contrasts. After arrival and overnighting in Casablanca, we travel to Tangier, Fez, Rabat and Marrakesh. Off the beaten track, we will visit Tetouan, Chefchaouen, the blue city, Moulay Idriss, one of the holiest Muslim pilgrimage sites in Morocco, Meknes, and Volubilis, the end of the Imperial Roman Road.

Artfully dodging donkeys and handcarts through the labyrinthine maze of narrow pathways in bustling medieval medinas, we will explore Moroccan and Berber handicrafts and culture. We will visit notable architectural, garden, and art venues, informed by Arabic, European, African, Roman, Jewish, French and Spanish traditions - Fountain at Mausoleum of Mohammed V, literally the crossroads between Europe and Africa. Enjoy Moroccan cuisine shared in Rabat, Morocco. Photo courtesy of Mary charming riads, enriching our experience. The beautiful Atlas and Rif mountain scenery Hunt. will complete this colorful canvas and will leave indelible impressions.

The opportunity to sign up for this trip will be available in early November for SAA members only. If you are not yet an SAA member, you may join online on our website, https://www.societyforasianart.org/membership/join-renew.

LOTUS LEAVES

Read the Spring 2019 Issue Online We are delighted to present an article on Bencharong ceramics, highly colorful export ceramics made in China for the Thai royal family. Dawn Rooney, who is the author of the seminal work on these ceramics, provides an excellent overview of this art form. In the second article, Asian Art Museum Associate Curator of Korean Art, Hyonjeong Kim Han, takes us into the world of a master Korean calligrapher, Kim Jeonghui, and shows how his work reflects the intellectual milieu in which he lived. The issue concludes with a short article by Asian Art Museum Deputy Director, Robert Mintz, about Your Dog, the contemporary Japanese culture that graced Osher Plaza in front of the museum until recently. To access online issues of Lotus Leaves: • Go to the SAA website, www.societyforasianart.org. • Click on the “Lotus Leaves” tab on the banner along the top of the homepage. This will open the Lotus Leaves webpage. • Click on “View PDF” of the issue you would like to read. Cover of Spring 2019 Issue of Lotus Leaves. To print a copy of Lotus Leaves: © Society for Asian Art. • Press “Ctrl and P” on your keyboard at the same time. • Follow the commands your computer gives you to print a copy.

6 REGISTRATION FORM

How to Register 1. Go to our website, www.societyforasianart.org, sign up and pay online; OR

2. Print and fill out this registration form, and send it with a check or the credit card information to: Society for Asian Art, 200 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA 94102.

SAA does not issue tickets or confirmations. You will be contacted ONLY if your registration cannot be completed. Requests for refunds are granted for cancellations received by the SAA office no later than one business week before the start of the event. Paid Programs Fee Quantity Subtotal

q November 9 Member Event - Chang Dai-chien: California’s Modernist Master with Mark Dean $15 Members Johnson $20 Non-Members

q November 16 Member Event - How the Indian Ocean Spice Trade Made the World Modern with $15 Members Eric Tagliacozzo $20 Non-Members

q December 8 Member Event - Annual Holiday Celebration at Richard Gervais Collection and Living $50 Members Green Design $65 Non-Members

$175 Members q January 24 - May 8 Spring 2020 Arts of Asia Lecture Series: Visions of the Afterlife in Asia $200 Non-Members

q January 26 - March 22 Spring 2020 Literature & Culture Course: The Literature of Soviet Central $115 Members Asia with Emily Laskin $140 Non-Members

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Donations for Book Sale

We now accept books throughout the year for our annual Book Sale. So if you move, downsize or are tired of all the books collecting dust in your home, please donate them to our Book Sale. We are accepting books with Asian subjects only, be it art, culture, novels, history, travel, cooking, exhibition catalogues or others.

Due to construction at the museum, we are unable to accept book donations at the SAA office. You can drop off books at the Friday morning Arts of Asia lectures. If you have a lot of books, we are happy to pick them up from your home within the Bay Area. Please contact the SAA office at 415-581-3701 or [email protected] for details.

7 Society for Asian Art 200 Larkin Street San Francisco, CA 94102 (415) 581-3701 [email protected] www.societyforasianart.org

Highlights from Chang Dai-chien: Painting from Heart to Hand

Left: Mountain in Summer Clouds, 1970, by Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian; Chinese, 1899-1983). Framed panel; ink on paper. Asian Art Museum, Gift of the artist, B73D3. Photograph © Asian Art Museum.

Right: Divine Redwood Trees (Shenmu) in Taiwan, 1970, by Chang Dai-chien (Zhang Daqian; Chinese, 1899-1983). Framed panel; ink on paper. Asian Art Museum, Gift of the artist, B73D4. Photograph © Asian Art Museum.

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