taipei times, Thursday, Apr 07, 2005
Taipei Art Fair stimulates local market for aesthetes
What began in 1992 as a way to showcase local galleries has become an
international event
By Susan Kendzulak, CONTRIBUTING REPORTER

Trade shows are great venues for networking and seeing the latest
innovations in the field. The Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall
has been host to many such exhibitions including those for bicycles,
books and computers. Now this weekend (starting April 8 and running to
April 12t) it will host an exhibition showcasing the best of
contemporary art in Taiwan.

Organized by the Art Galleries Association ROC, the Taipei Art Fair
began in 1992 as a way to showcase the local galleries and help link
them to collectors. By 1995, it became an international art fair with
the inclusion of galleries outside Taiwan. In 1997, in spite of a
financial downturn in Asia that severely affected the art market, there
were over 50,000 visitors and US$3.8 million in sales, thus showing that
the huge exhibition was a continuing success.

With each passing year, the Taipei Art Fair grows and improves. So in
2004, the government, along with the private sector, formed the Taipei
Executive Committee in order to bring reputable international galleries
to Taiwan and to provide consultation services for collectors while
helping to strengthen the market for Taiwanese art.

[image] As Firm as a Rock is a copy of the famous Laocoon sculpture, but
transformed to look like a Dalmation dog. PHOTO COURTESY OF ART
GALLERIES ASSOCIATION
It must be remembered that Taiwan's art scene vastly differs from the
West as it has come a long way in an incredibly short amount of time.
Ever since the lifting of martial law in 1987, art schools, contemporary
art museums, residency programs, international biennials and local art
publications were established, along with more people who entered the
field as artists, gallery owners, art dealers, sponsors, critics,
curators and museum staff. And many of those people who helped build up
the art scene in Taiwan are still going strong.

Like any trade show, each participating gallery gets its own booth to
showcase its artists and there will be approximately 35 galleries
showing work.

Taipei MOMA will present Peng Hung-chih's (???) exhibition called Do
Dogs Wear Clothes? His version of the famed Laocoon sculpture clothed as
a Dalmatian will be on view as well as some witty photographs and a video.

In addition to the solo gallery booths, there will be four separate
exhibitions organized by different curators. The Post-Stone Age: Taiwan
Contemporary Young Artists Special Exhibition curated by artist Wang Jun
Jieh (?? ?) will explore what it is to be a Taiwanese artist working
in the digital age and will include painting, film, kinetic sculpture,
photography and interactive digital installations by nine local artists.

Hyper Link: Contemporary Art Space and Artist Village Network in Taiwan
is curated by artist and writer Yao Jui-chung (???) and will show how
abandoned places in Taiwan have been transformed into successful places
for art.

This decade has seen a mushrooming of such spaces. Examples include
Stock 20 in Taichung, Art Site of Chiayi Railway Warehouse, Kio-A-Thau
Artist Village in Kaohsiung, and the Taidong Railway Arts Village, to
name a few.

Shaih Lifa curated the Taiwan Local Art Exhibition to showcase the
historical development of art in Taiwan; while Liu SY Elaine organized
The Masterpiece from Taiwan Collectors in order to highlight the
collector's choice in the local art scene and as a strategy to encourage
more people to collect art.

Strangely enough, a non-Taiwanese artist is crowned Artist of the Year
for this art fair. Japanese artist Ozawa Tsuyoshi will present Vegetable
Weapon.

The series of photographs shot in Tokyo, New York and Beijing shows a
young woman holding vegetables arranged as a gun. After the photos were
taken, the vegetables were made into a hot pot.

This will be a great opportunity to sample the best in contemporary art
on the island and a little from abroad, and also a great place to buy
art to mark your stay in Taiwan.

Art Taipei 2005 (?????????)
Where: Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition Hall 3, ???? (??????)
When: April 8 to April 12

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2005/04/07/2003249511

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artdaily.com, 04/02/2005
International Asian Art Fair Celebrates 10 Years

NEW YORK.- The tenth International Asian Art Fair opened to the public
Friday April 1 and continues to Wednesday April 6, 2005. From its
inauguration in 1996, Anna and Brian Haughton’s groundbreaking fair
helped to reshape the way Asian art is appreciated. It opened up a
cultural meeting ground for the many Asian collecting fields and broke
down barriers between previously segregated categories. More recently,
the fair has promoted an intriguing dialogue between the antique and
contemporary, showing, side by side, the important traditions and
innovations of Asia through the ages. Exhibitors from the Far East,
Europe and the United States will present Asian art of every kind and
age, from India, China, Japan, Korea, the Middle East, the Himalayas and
South East Asia.

The International Asian Art Fair has received rave reviews over the
years. The New York Times called it “a visually exhilarating
experience”, The Times of London “phenomenally successful” Art and
Antiques acclaimed it an “…unqualified success…” , The International
Herald Tribune “A wonderland fair”.

The 58 exhibitors are highly-respected and knowledgeable in their fields
and, as a further safeguard for buyers, each item for sale on the stands
has been strictly vetted for quality and authenticity by other
recognized specialists.

The fair draws exhibitors from as far afield as Japan where Uragami
Sokyu-Do Co. Ltd is known for Chinese, Korean and Japanese antique
ceramics and Hokusai prints and Hiroshi Yanagi offers Japanese
paintings, screens, ceramics, sculpture and lacquer. Grace Wu Bruce has
outstanding Chinese Ming furniture at her galleries in London and Hong
Kong. Both Andy Hei (Chinese furniture and works of art) and Galaxie Art
(ancient Chinese art) come to the fair from Hong Kong; Mehmet Hassan,
with Himalayan, Chinese and Silk Road material, is based in Bangkok,
Thailand. Leslie Kehoe from Australia has attracted great interest with
Muromachi Period (1333-1573) to contemporary Japanese works, including
dramatic screens by contemporary artists who are re-interpreting this
traditional art form.

John Eskenazi, Doris and Nancy Wiener, Terence McInerney and Simon Ray
are considered some of the world’s most distinguished experts in the
fields of Indian, Himalayan, Gandharan and South East Asian Art. These
dealers from London and New York present stunning, varied and important
works that are coveted by museums and private collectors alike. For
instance Simon Ray of London shows two large and important Indian
textiles: one a huge painted temple hanging depicting scenes from the
life of Krishna which include, in intricate detail, hundreds of figures
of gods, humans and animals (watercolor on cotton, circa 1820); the
other an embroidered tent panel circa 1700 of red quilted cotton
embroidered in polychrome silk threads with a design of a cusped arch
containing an elegant flowering plant in a vase. This was exhibited in
1982 at the Victoria and Albert Museum in The Indian Heritage, Court
Life & Arts under Mughal Rule.

About half of the exhibitors represent Chinese works. For instance S.
Marchant & Son, Roger Keverne, The Chinese Porcelain Co., Blitz Chinese
Ceramics and Works of Art and Berwald Oriental Art are best known for
antique Chinese ceramics, although they also offer other objects.
Michael Goedhuis is a dealer in contemporary Chinese art. Chinese
textiles are the specialties of Cora Ginsburg of New York and Francesca
Galloway, Jacqueline Simcox and Linda Wrigglesworth from London. Carlo
Cristi from Milan brings Tibetan, Nepalese and Indian bronzes,
sculptures and paintings, Southeast Asian sculptures, and textiles from
China and Tibet and A. & J. Speelman present Chinese sculpture and works
of art, as well as Tibetan bronzes.

Japanese art has grown in demand over the last few years as, in general,
have later works of art and objects from the 19th and 20th centuries and
even the 21st century. Among the eminent Japanese art dealers is Joan B.
Mirviss of New York whose stand is a mix of antique Japanese screens,
prints and objects and contemporary pottery. A wonderful Late Meiji
period group of grey herons is one her highlights (below). Kagedo
Japanese Art from Seattle focus on the early 20th century, with an
expert selection of wonderful designs in Japanese ceramics, basketry,
bronzes, lacquer and painting. Malcolm Fairley of London and Flying
Cranes of Manhattan have been a major influence in the developing market
for the best 19th century Meiji art. Eric Thomsen from Germany brings
Japanese screens, paintings, tea ceramics and signed bamboo baskets and
Brian Harkins is a leading London dealer in Japanese and Chinese works
of art and Japanese paintings. Liza Hyde (New York) is a foremost dealer
in beautiful antique Japanese painted screens that look superb wherever
they are placed, as pictures on a wall or standing in a space of any
period style. Gregg Baker (London) deals in Japanese and Chinese screens
of great rarity as well as other works, both Chinese and Japanese.

http://www.artdaily.com/section/news/index.asp?int_sec=2&int_new=13191

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IHT, Saturday, April 2, 2005
U.S. considers Chinese art import limit
By Randy Kennedy The New York Times

NEW YORK Chinese officials have asked the United States to restrict
imports of a wide range of artifacts from the prehistoric period through
the early 20th century because they believe that demand in the United
States for Chinese antiquities has helped fuel a sharp increase in
looting of archaeological sites and even thefts from museums over the
past several years.

Currently, U.S. Customs officials can reject the importation of items
from China that are suspected of having been stolen or looted, but, in
practice, relatively few items are seized. Under the proposed
restrictions, which would most likely be imposed as part of a bilateral
treaty, many artworks and artifacts could be prevented from entering
unless they had been specifically approved for export by the Chinese.
Such restrictions could have serious implications for U.S. museums and
auction houses.

The request has set off an impassioned debate in the world of Asian art.
Many prominent archaeologists, preservationists and scholars have lined
up to support the Chinese government, while many antiquities dealers and
museum officials argue that the changes would be unfair, ineffective in
stopping looting and devastating for the art market and museums.

The issue is a hot topic here as art dealers and collectors gather for
the auctions, shows, and parties surrounding Asia Week.

The looting of thousands of antiquities from Iraq since the American
invasion in 2003 has heightened international concern about the threats
to many countries' cultural treasures.

Over the past few years, the trade in plundered Chinese artifacts has
also drawn more attention in the United States because of several
high-profile cases, including one in 2000 in which customs officials
seized a 10th-century marble relief panel that they said had been
chiseled from an ancient tomb in northeastern China and was scheduled to
be sold at Christie's.

Opponents of the restrictions say that the United States represents only
one part of a thriving international market for Chinese artifacts,
including growing demand among wealthy collectors in China itself.

And they contend that China has not done enough within its own borders
to protect its cultural patrimony. A 1983 U.S. art-importation law that
offers help to countries that can show they are working to protect their
cultural heritage in keeping with a 1970 UN agreement.

"The statutory requirements have not been met - it's as simple as that,"
said Ashton Hawkins, a former lawyer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art
and now president of the American Council for Cultural Policy, a New
York-based group of museum officials and prominent art collectors.
"Until they are, this remedy should not be offered to China."

But supporters of stricter laws argue that China has made great strides
in recent years in protecting archaeological and other cultural sites
and in prosecuting pillagers, many of whom sell antiquities to smugglers
for a tiny fraction of the price the items eventually fetch at foreign
auctions. The supporters acknowledge that the United States is only one
player in the world market, but they contend that it would set a
powerful example by helping China stem the flow of plundered artifacts.

"The U.S. is a major market for the purchase of these antiquities that
have been illegally dug up and illegally exported from China, and the
United States ought to be leading the way on this," said Robert
Murowchick, director of the International Center for East Asian
Archaeology and Cultural History at Boston University. "Once a site is
gone, it's gone forever. You can't put it back together."

Opponents of the changes argue that the United States may make up only 4
percent of international auction sales of Chinese antiquities, but some
dealers say that a much larger percentage of such items sold around the
world ends up in the United States, a contention echoed in an interview
on Thursday with an official in China's State Administration of Cultural
Heritage, which works to protect antiquities. "The U.S. is a big part of
this market," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The 1983 law, in conjunction with the 1970 Unesco agreement, allows
countries to ask the United States to restrict the import of cultural
objects as a way to try to stop such pillaging. Over the past several
years, 11 countries, including Cambodia and Mali, have been granted
import restrictions under the law, which does not cover items that can
be proved to have left their countries of origin before the curbs took
effect.

China's request is now being considered by a committee of 11 - including
representatives from academia, the art trade, and the museum world -
appointed by the White House to advise the State Department. There is no
deadline for the panel to make a decision and, because most hearings and
deliberations are closed to the public, there are also few indications
of what the group may recommend.

But China is unlikely to get everything it wants. For one thing, the
1983 law covers only cultural items at least 250 years old, so the 19th-
and early-20th-century art that China is seeking to protect is highly
unlikely to be included. And in previous cases with other countries, the
committee and the State Department have not always granted all the
requested import curbs - for example, leaving out certain categories
like coins or restricting items only from certain periods.

The debate over the issue has illuminated what some see as a growing
rift between museums and archaeologists over the proper ways of studying
and preserving antiquities. Directors of four American museums - the Art
Institute of Chicago, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the
Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas
City, Missouri - spoke against China's request at a hearing in February
on the issue. While officials from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York City did not attend, James Watt, chairman of the Met's Asian art
department, has in interviews been highly critical of archaeologists and
their calls for tougher import restrictions.

"Archaeologists have overemphasized their own importance and used the
present political and social atmosphere to behave in a way that is
extremely damaging," Watt said in a 2002 interview in Orientations
magazine, a publication for Asian art collectors. "They should not be
given a monopoly on the study of culture and antiquities."

He added: "I am not in favor of illegal digging, but it is not something
that can be stopped."

Michael Zao contributed reporting from Beijing for this article.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/01/news/art.html

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IHT, Saturday, April 2, 2005
Chinese dominate Asia Week
By Souren Melikian International Herald Tribune

Plethora of masterpieces available at New York auctions

NEW YORK The art market is increasingly looking like an extension of the
geopolitical sphere. Suddenly, the Chinese are all over the place. The
New York Asia Week, which opened Monday, could be renamed the China
Week. Not that other Asian countries are absent. It is the sheer weight
of China that is overwhelming.

Several factors combine to give Chinese art this predominance. One is
the availability of masterpieces for sale in numbers unthinkable in any
other area of the market, where penury is the overriding concern.
Another is the massive surge of art collecting in mainland China, which
is changing the entire Chinese art game.

On Wednesday at Christie's, where more than a third of those attending
were Chinese, the makeup of the sale bore witness to the leading part
played by the Chinese. It reflected traditional Mandarin preferences,
with special emphasis on jade, for which the Chinese have a passion, and
smaller contingents of lacquer and rhinoceros horn vessels.

The Song period, perceived in China as a golden age, was admirably
represented, thanks in part to a ceramics collection built up over some
30 years by the great American connoisseur Robert E. Barron III of New
Orleans.

Brilliantly put together by Athena Zonars, head of the Chinese art
department, the auction benefited from the input of the international
director of Chinese art, Theow-Huang Tow, and his contacts in the
Chinese world. The eagerness of the Chinese bidders charged the
atmosphere with electricity and goaded Western players.

The first piece of lacquer, an exquisite square tray of the 15th century
carved with plants springing from rocks, was bought for $15,600 by the
University of Florida Harn Museum of Art. So was a rare 16th-century
tripod vessel reproducing a bronze shape from ancient China, which cost
$31,200. In between, an even rarer box was snatched by a Hong Kong
dealer for $13,200. It was decorated in the early 1500s with a scene
depicting a Westerner.

One of the two great rarities in the sale was pounced upon by a buyer
from mainland China. A 12–panel silk screen, simulating paintings
mounted in wooden frames woven under Qianlong, illustrates a trompe
l'oeil technique introduced by the Jesuits in the 18th century. The
screen brought $408,000, tripling Christie's highest expectations.

Song pottery triggered furious competition. One of the gems in the sale,
a black glazed jar with russet spots, cost an American collector
$138,000. Later, William Chak, another Hong Kong dealer, fought to the
bitter end to carry away a masterpiece incomprehensibly sold off by the
St. Louis Art Museum. The lobed "Junyao dish" went up to $396,800.

The Japanese, long absent from the market, are back, more determined
than ever. When a celadon basin of the 12th century reproducing a brass
model from Iran came up, its stark geometrical simplicity induced the
famous Japanese collector, Masataka Tomita, bidding through an agent, to
pay $330,000, six times the high estimate.

Interestingly, though, fantastic pots could also be had at approachable
prices as a result of objects dug up by the thousands in the last 25
years in defiance of Chinese law. An admirable jar with dark brown
motifs on a lighter brown ground was bought by a New York collector for
$16,800. Moments later, an extraordinarily beautiful jar of the seventh
century, with high shoulders covered with a translucent glaze of pale
aquamarine hue, was bagged for $37,000 by Daniel Eskenazi, the son and
business partner of the leading European connoisseur dealer in early
Chinese art, Giuseppe Eskenazi of London.

On Thursday at Sotheby's, excitement reached the boiling point. In a
very uneven sale that included some hair-raising duds among the jade and
pottery pieces, two rarities stood out. A blue and white vase of the
early 14th century was triumphantly carried away by a Chinese bidder who
paid $216,000. But the rarest piece - a decanter painted in red copper
enamels in the late 14th century - triggered a battle between the
Japanese dealer Noriyoshi Horiuchi and Giuseppe Eskenazi. Eskenazi won,
paying over $2 million for the decanter and quadrupling Sotheby's estimate.

Splendid as they were, the auctions gave only a modest idea of the
importance of the art available in the Chinese field. Taken together,
the art dealers' shows outshined what Christie's and Sotheby's had to offer.

Extraordinary bronzes from ancient China continue to tumble on to the
market. In the Eskenazi show at Pace Wildenstein, on view until April 9,
a Shang period wine vessel of the 11th century B.C., cast with stylized
birds in low relief, provides insight into the circumstances in which
such vessels were created. An inscription states that a man called Xiang
received money which "he used to cast a vessel in memory of his father."
The vessel, as beautiful as any in the Freer Gallery of Art in
Washington, carries a $1.6 million price tag.

The best Chinese sculpture is likewise to be seen in the selling shows.
At Eskenazi's, a marble seated Buddha of the eighth century, now missing
its head, has a calligraphic flow to the stylized folds of the drape
that makes it unforgettable. To those concerned with more recent Chinese
culture, the ultimate rarity is a hitherto unpublished terra cotta
figure of the seated goddess Guanyin, painted in green, ocre and white
enamels dated 1500. The donor is named, as is the maker, "Qiao Bin, a
craftsman of the Eastern Gate in this country" (meaning a county in
Shaanxi Province).

A sound indicator that an area of the art market is prospering is
provided by the ease with which works of great beauty can be acquired at
prices within the reach of those who are not multi-millionaires. In
James Lally's show of "early Chinese ceramics" at 41 East 57th Street,
several stoneware vessels offered as part of a New York collection
formed in the last 15 years or so could have been taken straight into
any of the world's leading museums.

A brown glazed jar dating from the eighth or ninth century has bluish
splashes that on closer inspection, conjure up animal forms (tapirs?).
On loan to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2001, the vessel, which sold in
the region of $150,000, qualifies as an underpriced world-class masterpiece.

A Song period vase of the 12th century with a glaze resembling
tortoiseshell was cheap at $20,000, despite very minor repairs to the
surface. There is no known match to it.

Major innovative research that puts a whole category of art in
perspective is another unfailing sign of rude health. This is what Edith
and Joel Frankel have achieved in selling the show "Zisha: The Purple
Sand of China," on view at their gallery until April 30. Devoted to the
collection of Yixing pottery owned by Thomas Y.P. Lee, who inherited it
from his grandfather, Lee Gee-Rie, its publication represents a landmark
in Chinese ceramics studies.

The inscriptions, which were read by Eileen Hsu of the Princeton
University Museum, range from long poems to short maxims or simple
signatures. They highlight the inseparable link between the concepts of
a culture and its objects. On a teapot in the form of a bamboo hat,
"made by Quingyun in the spring of 1821," a single line proclaims: "The
State of Buddhahood is wordless."

Models of stark modernity in the geometrical handling of their metallic
shapes are surprisingly early. If its inscriptions are to be trusted, a
hexagonal teapot made by Chen Hezhi dates from 1644. By Thursday night,
25 out of the 29 pieces had found a new home. The most important vessel,
a water-dropper in the shape of an eggplant signed Chen Mingyuan, cost
its buyer $50,000. When the show closes, it will go back to China.

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/01/features/melik2.html

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NYT, April 1, 2005
ART REVIEW; Asia Week Is Here, There, Everywhere
By HOLLAND COTTER

TIME was that Asia Week in New York meant one-stop shopping. You went to
the International Asian Art Fair, and the who's and what's that mattered
were there: dealers, collectors, curators, scholars and, of course, art.
Sure, there was the odd outside show. Giuseppe Eskenazi flew in from
London with Chinese sculpture that made everyone faint. But the fair, at
the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue, was Asian Art Central, at
least for that week.

Much has changed. Now Asia Week is a complicated package deal. The fair,
10 years old, is in place, seasoned and attractive, if thinner and less
than electrifying than of yore. And gallery shows are all over the
place. Some are put together by art fair dropouts who set up shop in
rented spaces; others by Manhattan galleries that also have booths at
the armory; and still others by dealers who never signed on with the fair.

The point is that to fully experience Asia Week now, you have to leave
the armory and hit the streets. And this is healthy. It gets the blood
going, brings in new players, spreads the energy. Besides, with China
cracking down hard on ''cultural property'' exports, who can predict how
the art business will go? Best to diversify, though so far, business
this Asia Week seems to be going fine.

Naturally, it would have been great if the Asian Art Fair's 1996
start-up team of dealers had stayed intact. But in fact some of the team
is intact, which is why the fair continues to bring surprises, and why
people come back.

You walk into the show this year and the first thing you see is a nearly
life-size stucco sculpture of a smiling young woman, full-breasted and
nude to the waist. She looks familiar, but you can't quite place her. An
uncharacteristically cheerful Venus? An unusually demure nature goddess?
She's the Buddha's mother, Maya, carved in the third century B.C. in the
area known as Gandhara -- now in Pakistan and Afghanistan -- where India
and the Mediterranean met.

She's one of several marvelous Gandharan pieces brought by John
Eskenazi, cousin of Giuseppe, another being a grave, bearded,
bare-chested male who looks like Zeus but is probably the bodhisattva
Vajrapani. All biceps and soul, he's pure proto-Michelangelo. But he's
upstaged by two South Indian temple bronzes, absolute classics, and
another rarity: a carved terra-cotta column from Chandraketugarh, dated
to the first or second century B.C. and covered with loving couples,
animals, demons and flowers.

Mr. Eskenazi's booth is itself an art fair classic: you drop by every
year wondering if it'll blow you away again, and it does. The same goes
for Doris and Nancy Wiener's display. It's particularly rich in Khmer
sculptures this time, among them a small bronze statue of the goddess
Prajnaparamita, the symbolic mother of us all, whose dozens of raised
protective arms look like unfolding wings.

Across the way, Terence McInerney has an exquisite Mogul miniature,
attributed to the artist Manohar, depicting the story of Tobias and the
angel. This is a good year for painting. At Carlo Cristi, you find a
Tibetan Buddhist manuscript with a picture of devotees riding a gilded
go-cart to heaven. Simon Ray has a 19th-century painting of the life of
Krishna, as big as a movie screen. And China 2000 brings us into the
present, with brush and ink landscapes by Zeng Xiaojun done just last year.

Korean art has a strengthened presence this year, with the Khang
Collection back after some seasons away. Middle Eastern Islamic art, by
contrast, is sparse -- Sam Fogg didn't come from London, alas -- though
several galleries with tile work and calligraphy at the Arts of Pacific
Asia Show downtown, which the International Asian Art Fair is beginning
to resemble ever so slightly around the edges, take up some of the slack.

The downtown fair, in the 69th Regiment Armory, on 26th Street, has an
ambience very much its own: informal, neighborly, kookier even. Booths
tend to be small, but so does the art, much of which is kind of a
mini-version of what's uptown. And were I the collecting type, I'd be
more than happy to walk away with some of what's here: a thumb-size
bronze Buddha from the Dutch gallery Astamangala; or a Sumatran silk
wrap from Chinalai Tribal Antiques; or a terra-cotta Tang horse -- not
one of those willowy uptown thoroughbreds, but a sturdy, chunky, cheaper
little mount -- from Marc Richards.

As for kooky, stroll the aisles and you'll pass a booth filled almost
entirely with portable Buddhist shrines (A.&S. Ziesnitz), and another
dense with Samurai gear (Robert Winter). Cedric Curien-Art Asiatique has
a lifetime supply of Rose Medallion porcelain. Sagemonoya is Netsuke
City. Collecting, I'm told, is about love first, ambition second. There
are many definitions of ''the best,'' and you may well find yours here.

In the Galleries

If, however, you want a sense of what high end means, drop by Giuseppe
Eskenazi at PaceWildenstein. Sometimes he shapes a show around a theme;
this year he hasn't, which is fine. Each of the dozen pieces here, from
a superlative late-Shang bronze wine vessel to a glazed Ming bodhisattva
with elaborate robes and infantine face, is a show in itself. Put it in
a room, turn on a light, and you have your own blockbuster. The stuff is
that good.

Across 57th Street in the Fuller Building, Rossi & Rossi is setting a
gold standard, literally, with ''Treasures From Mongolia: Buddhist
Sculpture From the School of Zanabazar'' at Barbara Mathes. This London
gallery has brought horizon-expanding art our way with awesome
regularity, and is doing so again with some two dozen gilded copper
images of Buddhist deities and holy men, among them the artist-monk-guru
Zanabazar (1635-1723). The last comparable gathering of such work in
America was in 1996 and never reached New York. Most of the Rossi &
Rossi pieces sold before the show opened. You can see why.

The Fuller Building, incidentally, has become a sort of new Asia Week
headquarters. There are a dozen special exhibitions in progress, and
Throckmorton Fine Art, with handsome Chinese Buddhist sculptures farther
east on 57th, qualifies as an off-site extension.

Still in northern Asia, Carlton Rochell has a chamber music-scale show
of Silk Road textiles, the earliest dating to the Han dynasty (206 B.C.-
A.D. 221). It is nothing more than a scrap, a band of woven wool
detached from a woman's skirt. Yet its motif of winged horses, filled in
with color like cloisonné, is so jaunty and sweet you know it must have
delighted its maker. Every item here is like that: a little patch of
fantastic. In its modest way, the show picks up where the Met's
fantastic show ''When Silk Was Gold'' left off, and couldn't be more
welcome.

Gisèle Croes has even earlier material: Chinese bronze ritual vessels
from the Shang period (1600-1027 B.C.). The examples she finds are
invariably either so big, or expressive, or dramatic in some way that
you know instantly why these objects were, and are, such potent cultural
emblems. They don't speak a language of grace. They speak of a magnetic,
eye-of-the-universe, suck-in-the-light power, like the Kaaba in Mecca,
or some of Richard Serra's early sculptures.

As for grace, try the Chinese ceramics at J.J. Lally. Bronzes never
relax, but ceramics do. They can carry themselves lightly, as the white
Song porcelains in this show do. Or be playful, like the Tang basin with
a flower floating psychedelically at its center. And they can have the
studied nonchalance of improvised dance, which is the impression given
by an eighth-century stoneware jar half covered with dark glaze and
splashed with skim-milk blue.

Japanese art conveys a similar fluid poise and fluidity, evident in
shows by three galleries in the Fuller Building. One of them, Mika
Gallery, moved in last year and marks Asia Week with a choice selection
of early Buddhist sculptures and calligraphic pieces. The space is tiny,
the exhibition style spare and clean, like that favored by Koichi Yanagi
Oriental Fine Arts on 66th Street, a sterling model.

Yanagi has a show of its own, ''Arts of the Nanbokucho and Muromachi
Periods,'' spanning 1336 to 1573. It includes some fine paintings, but
the centerpiece, and an Asia Week highlight, is a 15th-century portable
lacquered shrine with double doors front and back. One set opens on an
aerial- view painting of the famous Kasuga Shrine in Nara, a Shinto
foundation. The other set reveals a Buddhist reliquary in the shape of a
flaming jewel, glowing with light reflected from underlying sheets of
gold foil.

The Japanese specialist Sebastian Izzard has something special, too, in
his show of literati paintings, produced with the London Gallery of
Tokyo: a large brush and ink landscape by the artist and poet Yosa Buson
(1716-84), done a few years before his death. Like the works that
surround it, it channels Chinese tradition, but does something barely
definable to it, in the way Mongolian Buddhist art inflects Tibetan
prototypes and young artists all over the world today are discreetly
riffing on art of the past.

There is too much contemporary Asian and Asian-American art in New York
to touch on here, though at least one example relates more than a little
to Asia Week. It's in an exhibition at Kaikodo that is otherwise a
thousand-year sweep of ''classical'' Chinese painting and ceramics. The
contemporary piece, a project titled ''Through Masters' Eyes'' by the
conceptual artist Lee Mingwei, caps the survey by casting fixed notions
of art historical tradition in doubt.

For the project, Mr. Lee made a photocopy of a famous album painting by
the great 17th-century Chinese artist Shitao and asked 11 other artists,
six from Taiwan and five of different cultural backgrounds based in
America, to copy the image by hand, in some cases working from each
other's copies. Some of the results adhered closely to the original,
others departed radically from it. But in no case, whether filtered
through Chinese painting, Indian miniature painting, abstraction or
photo-collage, is the Shitao itself entirely lost from view.

A visit to Kaikodo's memorably beautiful space now would be a good idea;
the gallery will soon relocate to smaller quarters. And for me, Mr.
Lee's project -- which is much more complex than I've described it -- is
an Asia Week reward, a bracing image of continuity in change, a lesson
in how many ways there are to do a thing right. Oh, and speaking of
right, Kaikodo has titled its show ''Renewed by Time.''

http://query.nytimes.com/search/article-printpage.html?res=9F02E1D6133FF932A35757C0A9639C8B63

__________________

with kind regards,

Matthias Arnold
(Art-Eastasia list)

http://www.chinaresource.org
http://www.fluktor.de

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