Asian Art Museum: 2,500 Treasures from India to Indonesia

The Asian Art Museum is filled with three floors of ancient and sublime art, but most exquisite of all is ironically the only art created by a Westerner. That would be the building itself. It was an architectural jewel as the city’s Main Library for eight decades beginning in 1916, but its $170 million renovation by Gae Aulenti (the architect of Paris’ Musee d’Orsay) has turned it into a true masterpiece—and the repository of one of the largest collections of Asian art in the Western world—as the Asian Art Museum.

Inside the Beaux-Arts edifice, amid marble columns, bas-relief embellishments, vaulted ceilings and inverted skylights, is no less than the story of the Asian continent as told by thousands of years of art. This begins on the first floor, where the featured special exhibition is displayed in three large galleries. It's "Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance" from February 25 to September 11, 2011. Upstairs in the Thematic Gallery is "Here/Not Here: Buddha Presence in Eight Recent Works" (April 1-October 23, 2011).

Atop a marble staircase in Samsung Hall—the most impressive space in the museum—is the beginning of the permanent display of 2,500 artworks on the second and third floors. The Hall is filled with Chinese ceramics spanning 12 centuries, and along the Treasure Wall, large pieces ranging from a 19th-Century Nepalese brass guardian lion to a 10th-Century Vietnamese sandstone warrior. In adjacent galleries are gold, silver and jade treasures found in Korean tombs; Japanese bronze swords and Buddhas; and Chinese pieces as large as a 12-panel Quing Dynasty wood screen and as small as jewelry and intricate, three-inch-high ivory figurines.

Moving from country to country as you tour the museum’s 33 gallery spaces, the third floor features Hindu deity sculptures and a silver “elephant throne” from India; 2,000-year-old art pieces from Pakistan; limestone urns from the Philippines; ancient art from throughout Southeast Asia; puppets and headdresses from Indonesia; and most colorful of all, art treasures from the exotic reaches of Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan and Mongolia.

Even the mildly curious can spend hours in this museum admiring the art and reading the accompanying descriptions of the historical and religious context in which each piece was created. You can also tour the museum with free audio headsets or by taking the docent tours (at least 10 per day), which are focused on the special exhibition and the art of individual countries represented in the museum.

HelloSanFrancisco Tip: Visit the museum between 5 and 8 p.m. on Thursdays when admission is only $5—and you can take a dinner break in the museum’s Café Asia.

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