Five Centuries of Asia x Americas: Continued Connections

Made in the Portuguese territory of Goa, India, the cabinet crossed the Indian Ocean to Manila, in the Spanish Philippines. Finally, the cabinet crossed the Pacific to arrive in New Spain's capital, Mexico City.

Commissioned by the viceroy of New Spain, the double-headed eagle crest at the top symbolizes Spain's Habsburg dynasty, while the painted coat of arms is of Peru's Tagle family, who inherited the cabinet in the late 18th century.

The screen, or biombo, made in colonial Mexico is an adaptation of the Japanese folding screen esteemed by the colonial elite.

These bedcovers were first recorded in colonial American inventories in the early 1700s. By the eighteenth century English textile manufacturers adapted their design to machine-printed fabrics and produced a virtual craze for chintz among Anglo-American consumers.

Yasuo Kuniyoshi’s experiments with the subject of the modern swimmer demonstrate the artist’s sly sense of humor and were based on his summers at a coastal art colony in Maine. Solid forms, a flattened sense of space, and a dark palette mark this work as  belonging to his early career. He immigrated to the United States in 1906 and eventually moved to New York City. 

Bather with Cigarette was completed in 1924—the same year Congress effectively banned immigration from Asian countries. Two years earlier the Supreme Court ruled that Japanese people did not have the right to naturalization. 

While living in Mexico, he developed his iconic undulating bands and circles of chromatic variations partially inspired by the bold colors and striking patterns of 17th century Japanese Rinpa master Ogata Kōrin. 

Integrales II (Edgard Varèse) was created shortly after Sakai moved to the U.S. in the late 1970s, when Sakai introduces into his works a new pulsating dynamism still driven by color—forest green, fiery red, and opulent purple—as they swirl and collide into each other.

One of the first contemporary artists from China to establish a career in the U.S., Hung Liu is renowned for her painting’s retrieval of historically anonymous figures—particularly women, workers, and refugees.

In this installation, a bowl is offered to each painting of a true “goddess” in China in remembrance of the historic treatment of women—as an erotic symbol on the left and as a subservient character crippled with bound feet on the right. 

Danh Vo’s artistic practice is characterized by a continued interest in the public forces and private desires that define personal experience, especially as related to colonialism, Cold War expansion, and the Vietnam War. He and his own family migrated to Denmark in 1979 as refugees of the Vietnam War.

Vo disassembled the chairs to nine component parts and dispersed them across various collections around the world. The chairs’ earlier meaning of personal loss and memory between McNamara and John F. Kennedy is stripped and scattered to evoke the wider losses made from the decisions of their former occupants.