Eat at Cafe Asia, shop at the Museum Store — see the art at the San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.
Cafe Asia’s mission is to deliver an authentic Asian food experience as a complement to a gallery visit or as a destination in its own right. The menu offers a range of dishes from a variety of Asian traditions with daily specials that take advantage of fresh, seasonal ingredients.
The Asian Art Museum store is committed to extending and enhancing the gallery experience with items — including ceramics, basketry, textiles and jewelry — sourced directly from across Asia.Purchases support the museum’s educational programs and exhibitions as well as the artists and communities.
Spanning cultures from Turkey to India and China to the Philippines through 6,000 years, the Asian Art Museum collection provides a panorama of Asian art and culture. Included are over 18,000 objects ranging from tiny jades to monumental sculptures. Superb paintings, porcelains, arms and armor, furniture, textiles, and bronzes are featured.
It was pretty over the top, if you think about it, for an emperor to create an “underground army” comprising 7,000 warriors to accompany him into the afterlife and posterity. So it was fitting for the China’s Terracotta Warriors exhibition, currently on (through until the end of May) at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, to kick off with an over-the-top party.
About the exhibition:
Imperial leader, fearsome tyrant, military genius, avid anti-intellectual, obsessive star-gazer and enduringly mysterious, China’s First Emperor, Qin Shihuang (259-210 BCE) was all these and more.
The First Emperor conquered much in this life but his driving purpose was even greater, Asian Art Museum director Jay Xu said at one of the exhibition’s opening events. He sought to conquer death. In order to achieve immortality, he built himself a tomb — a vast underground city guarded by a life-size terracotta army including warriors, infantrymen, horses, chariots and all their attendant armor and weaponry.
First unearthed in 1974, the underground burial complex of the First Emperor was seen as a discovery on par with Egypt’s mummies and elaborate tombs. This exhibition includes ten figures — a representative sample of the actual army, which is estimated to include more than 7,000 life-sized figures and more than 10,000 weapons.
See more on China's Terracotta Warriors on the Asian Art Museum website here.
About the party:
The China’s Terracotta Warriors opening party, featuring Cheryl (will ruin your life), an artist collective that throws “the Big Apple's most outrageous party” and “...massive, sweaty, costumed affairs...” was billed as “an ultra-high-energy event sure to shake the Terracotta Army out of its 2,000 year slumber.” And it was. See the pictures.
China’s Terracotta Warriors: The First Emperor’s Legacy is on at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum through May 27, 2013.
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