The Buddha is levitating. Well, dangling from a forklift anyway. A mammoth 12th-century figure of Guanyin (the bodhisattva of compassion) from Northern China, it twirls gently, four feet above the dusty ebony floors, suspended in a straitjacket of yellow nylon webbing pulled tight across the folds of its marble robes. It's late December, and the 1,700-pound statue is one of the first artworks being installed in the still-unfinished north wing of the new Asian Art Museum, which opens this month in Civic Center.

It's easy to see why these stone and bronze statues are the first to go in. Around the corner, sparks are flying from the welders' torches as they rush to complete an installation in the Himalayas gallery, so no one is ready to unfurl any delicate ancient textiles or hanging scrolls just yet. But the fountains of yellow sparks, describing graceful arcs through the gloom of the unlit halls, might as well be fireworks celebrating the opening of the largest museum in the United States devoted exclusively to Asian art.

It is the realization of a long-held dream for San Francisco art lovers. For four decades, the Asian Art Museum's unparalleled collection of masterworks—now 14,000 pieces strong—has gone without a home worthy of its stature, languishing in storage or displayed in a sadly piecemeal fashion. With the long-planned new Jewish and Mexican museums, in Yerba Buena Center, proceeding fitfully at best, it's especially gratifying to see the new Asian opening at last.

"These large stone pieces are really very easy to install," principal preparator Guy Herrington, a big, easygoing art wrangler, says during a break. "Especially compared to the ceramics, like Beavis and Butt-head there." He's referring to a pair of colorful, nearly life-sized Tang Dynasty tomb-guardian figures, each sprouting a forest of delicate plumes, horns, and crests that look eminently breakable. He's not too fond of the lacquerware, either—those vanishingly thin coral-red bowls and ornamental objects covered with burnished extract from the tropical sumac tree. They are usually made of wood, and "sometimes the wood inside has completely rotted out," Herrington grumbles. "I don't even want to touch
'em."

As Herrington maneuvers his forklift between plastic-wrapped bodhisattvas, glimpses of shiny black basalt and gilt-flecked bronze hint at the treasures soon to be unveiled. That the museum has the luxury of devoting an entire wing of the third floor to Chinese Buddhist art symbolizes the extraordinary transformation it has undergone during its migration across town from its old home in Golden Gate Park. In this grand new space, ten exhibits, displaying some 1,200 objects on two floors, are devoted to Chinese art alone.

As the Guanyin Buddha dangles in midair, installation-team assistants Paul Palacios and Howard Faxon guide the statue toward its destination. Chief mount maker Vincent Avalos grabs the length of steel aircraft cable, the kind used to control 747s, that he's already threaded into a coupling installed in the base of the statue. He runs it through a hole in one of the white pedestals, then through a groove in a block of supersmooth, ultrahigh-molecular-weight polyethylene, which will allow the massive stone to rock from side to side, rather than snap off, in the event of an earthquake. He attaches the cable to a turnbuckle and adjusts the tension as nearly a ton of stone settles gently into place. Voilà! One more installation down, another 2,000 to go.


Anyone who's ever wandered the stacks of the old Main Library is in for a shock when the new Asian opens its doors. The building has been dramatically reworked by Milanese architect Gae Aulenti, who has cloven its musty spaces with inverted skylights, flooding them with light and air. The entire third floor, where Herrington mans his forklift, is new. The architectural elements that gave the old building its essential character have been thoughtfully, though not slavishly, preserved, including the richly decorated ceilings of the old reading rooms and the grand travertine central staircase.

The staircase beckons as soon as you enter the building, but a reception kiosk blocks the way. Most visitors will take a glass-enclosed escalator up to an orientation area on the third floor, which opens onto the India galleries. Guided by a free audio tour, they will proceed on this "recommended path" through masterworks from western Asia, Southeast Asia, the Himalayas, and China, then down to the second floor, where they'll encounter more works from China and others from Korea and Japan. While just 20 percent of the museum's holdings, some 2,500 pieces, can be shown at any one time, that is twice as many as could be displayed before. Even habitués of the old Asian are bound to discover a wealth of new material.

No matter where you wander in the new Asian, you will encounter extraordinary objects: a golden seated figure of Tara, the sensuous female bodhisattva of Nepal; a cheerful earthenware warrior from a 1,500-year-old Japanese tomb; a massive stone Ganesha, the jolly dancing elephant-god of India. A smattering of objects like these are distributed in the world's best museums, mostly in their home countries; for decades, it has been virtually impossible to export such art.

Perhaps the most impressive single installation in the new museum is the Jade Treasury, a small jewel box of a room with deep blue walls that look like velvet. In this mysterious setting, an array of 250 of the museum's best pieces are set off by dramatic pinpoint lighting. Visitors expecting to see much of the green and violet Burmese jade popular today may be surprised by the range in color of the antique jades, especially the abundance of the creamy "mutton fat" nephrite traditionally prized in China for its perceived curative powers. A similar, temporary exhibition at the old Asian brought in hordes of visitors, and museum administrators want to tap into that enthusiasm. They've cleverly hidden the Jade Treasury in the absolute farthest corner of the museum, so that patrons have to negotiate at least half of the galleries to get there.

Fortunately, such an expedition will be a pleasure. The museum's galleries have been designed in such a way that they pull you forward, from one wonder to the next, then stop you in your tracks. That is the work of George Sexton, a modest, serious man with wire-rim glasses that give him a thoughtful, scholarly air. He happens to be the best in the world at what he does: making beautiful objects look even better. In 1996, Asian Art Museum director Emily Sano took a group of trustees on a trip around the country to look at new work in exhibition design. They were most impressed by two innovative installations featuring Asian art, one at the Denver Art Museum, the other at the Honolulu Academy of the Arts. Both were the work of George Sexton.

One of Sexton's early projects was at the new I.M. Pei-designed east wing of the National Gallery, in Washington, D.C., in the early '70s. He worked with a man named Gil Ravenel, then head of installation and gallery design, who asked him to do the lighting and exhibition design. Their collaboration was a great success: "Sexton and Ravenel could make paper bags and old shoes look great," enthused one critic. Later, Sexton, who trained as an architect, worked in San Francisco, designing the blockbuster King Tut and Dresden-treasures exhibitions at the de Young Museum and the Legion of Honor, respectively. He returned to D.C. in 1980 to set up his own firm, which does everything from museum commissions to designing luscious lighting for fashion flagships such as the Louis Vuitton stores in Paris and Moscow.

Sexton says he was pleased with what he had to work with in San Francisco, but the project was dauntingly complex. The new Asian has 29,000 square feet of exhibit space, which certainly seems ample. However, the task is not to cram in as much stuff as possible; it is to allow a few well-chosen pieces to be appreciated to the fullest. This means arranging galleries so that large objects can be seen from a distance, installing some objects where they can be viewed in the round, placing others in an architectural context. Between the third and fourth India galleries, for example, visitors pass through an intricately carved stone door frame, which Sexton has installed just as it might have appeared in a tenth-century Hindu temple.

It seems an almost impossible task, figuring out how to display even a small portion of 14,000 singular things. The curators of each geographic realm of the museum provided Sexton with binders containing photographs of every object in their care, along with height, weight, conservation requirements, and other information. As various gallery configurations were considered, the selection was winnowed down to 2,000 must-have items, such as the rhinoceros-shaped bronze zun, or wine jar, from the Shang Dynasty, a perennial favorite of museumgoers, like the Metropolitan Museum's famous blue faience hippo.

From there on, it was almost child's play. Sexton's firm constructed a model of the museum, at the standard dollhouse scale of one inch to the foot. The model is 375 square feet but breaks down into 18 sections that can be manipulated independently. From scanned photographs, interns with clever, patient hands created effigies in cardboard and clay of virtually every major object to be displayed, plus every case, pedestal, and cabinet, all of which could then be moved around like dollhouse furniture. When the design was finished, the plans showed tiny photographs of every single item in its appropriate place.

But the bulk of Sexton's work, and the most important part, is the least noticeable: designing the cases that hold all these priceless treasures. "There's so much going on with a case, it's a piece of machinery in a way," he notes. A tremendous amount of effort goes into preserving a collection; some objects are so light-sensitive, for instance, they have to be rotated on a regular basis. Sexton's cases incorporate the latest hardware, delicate counterbalancing, hidden pocket doors, and scores of other tricks that allow the fewest conservators to reach the objects with the greatest degree of ease. The benefit for us is that objects will be rotated more frequently, so that every visit will be a new experience.

The final pieces of the puzzle, the last installed before the doors swing wide, are the interpretive materials, or "didactics," which help the mute stone statues, tapestries, and bowls tell their true stories. At the new Asian, three major, intertwining story lines run through the displays. The first centers on Buddhism, not because it is the most important of the region's many faiths, but because its spread throughout Asia helps to link all the disparate cultures, from Afghanistan to Japan (and it doesn't hurt that Buddhism is lavishly represented in Asian art). The second is about trade and exchange, which helps explain how a piece of 15th-century Chinese porcelain in the India galleries came to be owned by a 17th-century Mogul prince. The last major theme focuses on local beliefs and practices. In the India galleries, for example, you can view a video depicting a contemporary Hindu celebration, which should help bring the spirit of the art to life.

"There's a real ‘master narrative' here," says consultant Hal Fischer, who got a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop the didactic program, which includes elaborate wall-mounted graphics, specially commissioned videos, even plaques that visitors can carry from room to room.

"We've tried to make Asia accessible," says Emily Sano. "We don't want people to say, ‘Oh, my gosh, all those exotic dynasties and stuff. I don't understand it!'" You may be able to overlook Sexton's work, as he hopes, but it should be impossible to come away from the new Asian Art Museum uninformed or uninspired.

The new Asian Art Museum opens March 20, 200 Larkin St., S.F., (415) 581-3500.

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Where Did All This Stuff Come From?
It started with Avery Brundage, a Chicago developer who for 20 years was president of the International Olympic Committee. In Europe for the 1936 Olympics, Brundage saw a big exhibition of Chinese art in London, which sent him out to gather his own Chinese ceramics and jades. He soon sought samples of all the Asian arts, and his international position helped enormously in the quest.

For instance, Brundage worked hard to return Japan to the Olympic fold after World War II and brought the Summer Games there in 1964. The Japanese government showed its appreciation by "deregistering" some of its Important Cultural Properties so that Brundage could take them home.

In the 1950s, he offered his treasures to the Art Institute of Chicago. Incredibly, the museum turned him down. San Francisco was less shortsighted, and a deal giving the city most of Brundage's collection was struck in 1959.

For every act of largesse, though, Brundage extracted a pledge, starting with nearly $3 million to add a wing onto the de Young Museum, where the old Asian opened in 1966. After his first bequest (around 6,000 pieces), Brundage amassed a second collection nearly as large as the first. The city gained it (along with some $2 million in unpaid bills from art dealers)
in 1969. Even now, after many smaller bequests from other donors, Brundage's art accounts for 60 percent of the Asian's vast holdings.

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