US Asian art museum to reopen with fanfare

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Revitalized galleries, reimagined exhibitions and upgraded infrastructure greet the first Asian art museum in Washington DC following a nearly two-year renovation.

Freer Gallery of Art, together with its adjacent sister museum, the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, will launch a week-long reopening celebration titled "IlluminAsia: A Festival of Asian Art, Food, and Cultures" from Saturday night. Both galleries are part of the Smithsonian national museums and host to some of the best Asian art collections in the world.

"I am excited to finally open the doors to the public and reintroduce our visitors to the museum," Julian Raby, Director of Freer and Sackler Galleries, said on Wednesday.

"The Sackler is as playful, as theatrical, as the Freer is calm and contemplative. One provides a moment of hush, the other a rush," he noted, adding the renovated galleries "will encourage you to indulge in 'slow looking', to lose yourself in a reverie...to feel yourself refreshed like the doe at the fountain."

Photo via asia.si.edu

In his reopening speech, Ruby, who will retire next year after 15 years at the Smithsonian, also highlighted the museums' efforts to promote a shared sense of beauty across different peoples and build up connections between Asia, America and the world.

Among the packed reopening programs are a grand outdoor food festival, performances and a presentation of the animated artwork, "A Perfect Harmony" which will transform the Freer's facade into a vast canvas. Several long-anticipated art showcases with themes spanning from cats in ancient Egypt to bells in ancient China are part of the festivities.

One of the major exhibitions, titled "Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice across Asia," will take visitors to a Sri Lankan stupa, travel with an eight century Korean monk, and discover remarkable Buddhist artworks from China, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia and Japan.

"Here we can stand in awe at the varied imagination of people from another time and another place, and we can, like Freer, realize that for all the differences there was, there is a common urge for and often a shared vision of, beauty," he said.

The Freer and Sackler galleries possess more than 40,000 Asian artworks. /Photo via asia.si.edu

The Freer was shut down in 2015 to refresh galleries with the goal of evoking their original neoclassical aesthetic and enhancing the visitor experience by improving infrastructure and digital access. The Sackler has been closed since July for a refresh of its galleries.

The Freer, founded in 1923 as the first Smithsonian museum to be dedicated to the fine arts, was joined by the Sackler in 1987.

Together they comprise the two national museums of Asian art in the United States, featuring more than 40,000 Asian artworks, with especially fine collections of Islamic art, Chinese jades, bronzes and paintings, and the art of the ancient Near East.

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Source(s): Xinhua News Agency