The Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, located face to face of the city hall, is a pure gem. It has great collections of a variety of ancient and modern artifacts from a number of Asian countries, such as China, Korea, Japan, Thailand, Vietnames, and Cambodia.
China has such a long history that we have a great deal of museums on our ancient culture and artifacts, and I've visited so many. However, I was not aware how other Asian countries evolved at the time China was evolving from dynasty to dynasty. Therefore, the Asian Art Museum exhibition was such a great eye opener for me, and I was so happy to have a landscape view on arts from all these Asian countries.
Walking from one gallery to another, I definitely fell in love with Japanese artifacts from the early days. In modern arts from Japan, we often see designs with great simplicity and the fact that lots of Japanese artists pay great attention to details. I saw this in the their ancient design as well. Every shape and stroke was made with purpose and elegance, it's amazing.
What I found most interesting were the statues of Buddhas in all these countries. Apparently, when people were making them, they put their own imagination into the statues -- imagine what a Buddha looked like. It was interesting to see the Buddha statues from China looked like Chinese, those from India looked like Indiand and so on. It was so fun just to compare their looks!
If you come to San Francisco, the Asian Art Museum is definitely an interesting place to check out. The general admission is free on first Sunday of each month, remember to take advantage of that ;)
