Pacific Asia Museum

Pacific Asia Museum is one of only four institutions in the United States dedicated exclusively to the arts and culture of Asia and the Pacific Islands. The museum’s mission is to further cultural awareness and understanding through the arts.

Pacific Asia Museum has a collection of over 14,000 works of art including paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, jades and textiles from all over Asia and the Pacific Islands, and a research library containing more than 7,000 reference volumes relating to Asian and Pacific art and culture.

Calligraffiti: Writing in Contemporary Chinese and Latino Art addresses issues of power, culture, and universality. The process of writing in art is a central theme, permitting the exploration of correlations between the elevated form, calligraphy, and its historically devalued twin, graffiti. Suggesting that these visual practices mirror each other, the exhibition presents works that critique or parody social and artistic frames of reference. On exhibit through January 17, 2010

“Fashioning Domesticity, Weaving Desire: Visions of the Filipina” exhibition explores the canonical visions of the early to mid 20th-century Filipina as civilized and/or wild. Through the juxtaposition of traditional textiles and ethnographic photography, as well as objects of personal adornment and popular print culture, this exhibition addresses the fashioning of domesticity and the weaving of desire as political strategies of polarization. Interrogating the body as a (dis)embodied landscape activated by the braided contexts of colonialism and democracy, the exhibition acknowledges that central to this binary of conquest and governance is the co-existence, reflection, and collision of the “modern” and “primitive.” On exhibit through Febraury 8, 2010.

Recent Gifts to the Collection: Highlighting objects donated in 2008 from half-a-dozen collectors, the exhibition includes works of the Edo, Meiji and modern periods, showing paintings in the folding screen, hanging scroll and album formats, as well as woodblock prints, textiles, photographs and ceramics. Largest and most dramatic is an 18th c. screen painting of Pheasants in Spring in Autumn on gold leaf by a member of the Kano school. On exhibit through March 1, 2010

Pacific Asia Museum.
46 North Los Robles Avenue, Pasadena.  (626) 449-2742. Website: www.pacificasiamuseum.org.  Open: Wednesdays – Sundays, from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Cost: Adults, $7.00. Seniors and students, $5.00. Free admission every fourth Friday of the month.