LACMA

Not currently on view

Begun in the 1920s, LACMA’s collection of Chinese art expanded significantly from the 1960s on, growing from a core of ceramic works to include paintings, ancient bronzes, jades, and other decorative arts. Lacquers acquired through the assistance of the Sammy Yu-kuan Lee family are the finest in America and represent perhaps the greatest strength of the collection. The collection ranges from the Neolithic period (about 5000–1800 B.C.) to the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), with significant works from each period.

China

A Curator’s Adventures around the World

January 6, 2010

. . . Like many art historians studying Sino-Japanese art during the mid-twentieth century, George Kuwayama’s earliest research played out against the backdrop of historical drama. In our interview he spoke of his frustrating attempts to access artworks in war-torn Japan in the early 1950s. He also described at length a subsequent experience, examining Chinese masterpieces spirited away from the country during Chiang Kai-Shek’s retreat from China to Taiwan: "All the artworks came from the original Palace Museum in Peking. When the Sino-Japanese war broke out, they moved Chinese treasures from Peking to the south, to Nanking. When the Japanese came up the Yangtze River, they moved westward to Suchuan, and Chungking became the capital of wartime China" . . .

The Bactrian Camel

March 24, 2009

Even though LACMA’s Chinese galleries have yet to be reinstalled, last month more than 150 students explored one of the department’s objects—Funerary Sculpture of a Bactrian Camel—through our distance learning program, which provides real-time, interactive videoconferences to kindergarten through twelfth-grade classrooms nationwide on topics drawn from various areas of the museum’s collection. Subsequently, I too found myself drawn to this popular mingqi (clay replicas of a person, animal, or other object that were made to go in the tomb of the deceased). The camel was an import into China from the ancient kingdom of Bactria in present-day Afghanistan, a result of trade on the Silk Road. Able to store fat in two humps, thus needing less drinking water for long periods of time, the camel was the “fuel-efficient” mode of transport for its day . . .