Seattle Asian Art Museum

I visited the Seattle Asian Art Museum and viewed a wide variety of work. There were two exhibits, one of them was traditional ancient Asian Art mainly coming from Japan and China. The other was a Contemporary literary exhibit with a very modern feel to it. The age of some of the items that were in the traditional section were very impressive to me. Some of the items going back hundreds of years.

The influence of Buddhism in a lot of the Art in many of the Asian cultures is very apparent with Buddhas and other enlightenment symbols. Other influential Asian God’s were displayed as well such as the 1,000 handed God that was skilled in being able to do any job/ability. It was very interesting to me seeing this because I saw it as being a very similar thing in our western culture (especially in American) where you will see references to Christianity all over the place in the forms of crosses or icthuses.

The Contemporary literary exhibit was interesting but over all less impressive to me than the ancient exhibit mainly because it didn’t have the history and age working for it. I did find some of the works interesting a lot of which were based off of famous poems. There were some that spoke against war and violence, others that opposed Communism and promoted freedom of speech and thinking. One of the biggest works/sculptures was made up of huge scrolls that were covered in thousands of ‘fake characters’. It was meant to illustrate how we can be fooled by a lot of nothing in the world weather that is propaganda put out by the government, capitalism, or books most of it is fake. I found the idea behind the picture to be very intriguing and thought provoking.

Overall my trip to the Asian Art Museum was positive, however I would have liked to have seen more photography, or even in the contemporary section more info. about other literature. I felt it was lacking in content.