PREVIEWAsia Week
New York

1. Guanyin, 11–12thcentury, Dali kingdom,Yunnan, China, gilt bronze,
ht 38cm. Christie’s NewYork ($4m–$6m)

Eve Kahn selects herhighlights of the event

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2. Untitled (glowing sky with mist on mesquite
trees and brush), c. 1942–45, Kakunen Tsuruoka(1892–1977), watercolour on paper, 38 ×  56cm.
Scholten Japanese Art (price on application)

Fig. 3 photo: Richard Goodbody

decade ago, Asian art dealers in New
York scrambled to find a replacement
for their most enticing spring ritual.
The International Asian Art Fair, which had
debuted in the mid 1990s at the Park Avenue
Armory as the highlight of March events knownas Asia Week, was cancelled during the economic downturn. Dealers instead formed aconsortium to promote shows at their galleries,
mostly in midtown Manhattan and on theUpper East Side. They handed out pedestrianfriendly maps, and emphasised that gallery
visits could provide perks normally unavailable
at fairs, such as servings of tea and access tobackroom reference libraries. ‘We recognisedthat we had to work together,’ says Katherine
Martin, the director of Scholten Japanese Art
on West 58th Street.
The collaborative effort, now called Asia
Week New York (AWNY), has thrived. It brings
together about 50 dealers from the UnitedStates and abroad and has joined forces withauction houses and cultural institutions. The
fair-without-a-fair offers a whiff of adventure,
too, since New York’s Asian art galleries often
operate by appointment only. Many visitors
will make their first trips to spaces in narrow
townhouses on side streets, climbing creaky
wooden stairs or riding in glacially paced 19thcentury elevators.
At this year’s event, the historical works
coming to auction include a neolithic Chinese wheat-coloured vase (Bonhams, 18March) and a 17th-century painting by thefemale artist Wen Shu of butterflies alighting on flowers (Christie’s, 19 March). There
will also be a chance to see the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s recent acquisition of an
11th-century copper alloy statue from India

F E B R UA R Y 2 019 A P O L LO

depicting Shiva as Vanquisher of the ThreeCities. Modern and contemporary fare ranges
from images of conceptual artists spraying
pigments across snowy riverbeds in ‘Radicalism in the Wilderness: Japanese Artists in
the Global 1960s’ (at the Japan Society until
9 June) to the London-born, New York-based
artist Alexander Gorlizki’s witty updates ofIndian miniatures (at Cora Ginsburg Gallery). AWNY will shed light on millennia ofintellectual and artistic exchanges and misunderstandings, and the aftermaths of wars.
In a time of anger-driven support for walls toblock migration and threatened trade wars,
the annual ritual will provide tools for ‘making bridges of understanding’ between nations
and cultures, as Mike Hearn, the head of theMet’s Asian art department, observed at anAWNY press preview.
Joan B. Mirviss, a dealer specialising inJapanese art and ceramics, has organised aretrospective (with a lavish bilingual catalogue)of the work of the ceramicist Tomimoto Kenkichi (1886–1963), who travelled to England andbefriended Bernard Leach. Tomimoto encouraged his countrymen to study Western art andpursue invention in clay rather than repetition of traditional patterns. ‘Vessel Explored/Vessel Transformed: Tomimoto Kenkichi andHis Enduring Legacy’ will explore Tomimoto’s inspirations including Aristide Maillol’s
fleshy bronze women and William Morris’s
fern repeats (Fig. 3), as well as contemporary
Japanese artisans influenced by Tomimoto.
Mirviss says that few American collectors andinstitutions are aware of his work. She needs
to tell his story, she explains, at a high-profile
time like Asia Week.
The dealer Erik Thomsen is bringing out
Japanese screens made between 1910 and the1940s by artists who had taken their first trips
abroad and mixed mineral pigments and gold
to depict riots of red Indonesian flowers andlayers of undulating Chinese mountains. Thescreens also represent what Thomsen describes
as ‘a fascinating mix of East and West, with Japanese women in Western flapper dresses andJapanese sandals, walking a German shepherdor standing by a Christmas tree’. Records of theobjects’ back-stories are hard to find, however,
due to the number of artists and patrons whowere killed or traumatised in wartime and thepost-war collapse of the market for screens.
Equally challenging to document are
the biographies of Japanese American artists who were sent to concentration camps
in the American West and spoke little of theexperience afterwards. Scholten is devoting
a show to watercolours that the Tokyo-born
artist and dealer Kakunen Tsuruoka painted
in the 1940s while confined with his family atPoston ‘relocation centre’ in Arizona. Before
the war he was based in San Francisco, and heA P O L LO F E B R UA R Y 2 019

3. Gourd-shaped vase, after 1952, Tomimoto
Kenkichi (1886–1963), glazed porcelain with goldand silver overglaze, ht 15.2cm. Joan B. Mirviss(up to $200,000)‘The annual ritualwill provide tools
for “making bridgesof understanding”
between nationsand cultures’4. Commemorative bracelet, 1839–40, Guangzhou,
China, gold, diam. 6.4cm. Bonhams ($20,000–$30,000)

painted views of its civic buildings as well as
the Golden Gate Bridge and Yosemite peaks.
He acquired antiques as far afield as China andMongolia, and his intellectual circles included
the playwright Eugene O’Neill and the Harvard
museum curator Langdon Warner. During
the Second World War, Tsuruoka sketched
Poston’s barracks under ominous skies andits perimeter of purplish mountains and deadtrees clawing at scrublands (Fig. 2). After thewar he quietly ran small businesses in Manhattan that dealt in frames, art and artificial
flowers, and his wartime watercolours were
mostly kept tucked away.
A gold bracelet in Bonhams’ 18 March salehas mysterious origins in the realm of opium
deals gone wrong (estimate $20,000–$30,000;Fig. 4). A Cantonese metalsmith made thepiece around 1840 as a gift from Canton merchants for Ellen Wayles Randolph Coolidge,
one of Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughters. She
had briefly visited China with her husband, theBoston merchant Joseph Coolidge, who spentyears at a time in Asia while she raised their sixchildren. The bracelet is covered in symbols
of luck, longevity, and fertility, including butterflies and grapes, and inscribed with a list ofmerchants’ names. No one knows why suchan extravagant present was called for; Bruce
MacLaren, a Bonhams senior specialist, said
that locals may have wanted to make amendswith Ellen for some past rough treatment ofher husband. The auction consignor acquired
the bracelet at an antique jewellery sale in
Salem, Massachusetts (the Peabody Essex
Museum there owns a silver cup that Cantonmerchants presented to Joseph Coolidge).
Collections partly formed during past Asia
Weeks will also be breaking up this spring.
Christie’s will hold sales for possessions fromthe late philanthropists Florence and Herbert
Irving. Among the top lots is a multi-armed
gilt-bronze figure of the androgynous deity
Guanyin, who embodies compassion (estimate$4m–$6m; Fig. 1). Made about 1,000 years ago
in what is now Yunnan province in China, it isfestooned with feathers and tassels. It came tothe Irvings in the 1980s through the New Yorkdealer Alice Boney, after a decade-long loan tothe Denver Art Museum. A few components,
including some limbs, have been lost. One canonly wonder how the statue has survived solargely intact through a millennium of wanderings, and what horror and good fortune it
has witnessed. oEve Kahn is a freelance writer. She isworking on a biography of the painterMary Rogers Williams.
Asia Week New York is at variousvenues from 13–23 March. For moredetails go to www.asiaweekny.com.
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