Asian Art Museum opens in San Francisco - Front Page

Art in America, May, 2003 by Stephanie Cash

On Mar. 20, the Asian Art Museum opened in its grand new home in the heart of San Francisco's Civic Center. Housed in the Old Main Library, a 1917 Beaux-Arts building that underwent extensive retrofitting and a renovation designed by Italian architect Gae Aulenti (best known for transforming a Paris train station into the Musee d'Orsay), the new $160.5-million facility contains about 185,000 square feet, more than double what the museum had in its former home in a building it shared with the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park. (That structure, which suffered serious damage in the 1989 earthquake, has been torn down to make way for a new de Young building designed by Herzog & de Meuron.) In 1994, city residents approved a bond measure to rehabilitate the Old Main Library as a museum; the Asian continued to operate in Golden Gate Park until 2001.

The new building's second and third floors have some 29,000 square feet of gallery space to display nearly 2,500 objects from the permanent collection, which spans 6,000 years and includes examples from India, China, Tibet, Korea, Japan, the Middle East and West Asia. An additional 8,500 square feet of gallery space on the first floor is for temporary exhibitions. Glass-enclosed escalators whisk viewers from the ground level to the second and third floors. Though the galleries are accessible at a number of points, visitors are encouraged to follow a path recommended by the curators, beginning on the third floor, leading to the lower Samsung Hall, a large, newly restored ornate space that once served as the library's receiving room, and down the grand staircase to the ground-level lobby, where a cafe and gift shop are also located.

Currently on view are "From Monastery to Marketplace: Books and Manuscripts of Asia" and a small show illustrating the transformation of the Old Main Library building. Upcoming highlights include "Goryeo Dynasty: Korea's Age of Enlightenment (918 to 1392)," which runs concurrently with "Leaning Forward, Looking Back: Eight Contemporary Korean Artists"; both shows will be on view Oct. 18, 2003-Jan. 11, 2004. Though it has had a contemporary-art program for 10 years, the museum only recently began acquiring contemporary works and has beefed up its programming in that area.