(published in Arroyo Monthly Magazine July 2005)
Pasadena’s Pacific Asia Museum brings Asian culture to Southern California and beyond.
photos by Sarah Alvarado • Brooks institute of Photography
The architecture of the Pacific Asia Museum isn’t exactly what you’d expect from a downtown Pasadena building: a curved green roof, stone lions flanking an imposing, arched red door, a central outdoor courtyard with a koi pond. In short, it’s a Chinese-inspired building right in the heart of Southern California. But that’s what makes the building, and its purpose, so special: There’s nowhere like it—in Pasadena or anywhere else.
The museum, which features a collection of 14,000 works of art from China, Japan, Tibet, Thailand, India, New Guinea and other countries, is one of only four in the country that focuses exclusively on art of Asia and the Pacific, and it’s the only museum of its kind in Southern California. It is also a California Historic Landmark, a Pasadena Cultural Heritage Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places.
Not only does the Pacific Asia Museum possess and display an impressive array of objects, from Japanese silk paintings to musical instruments from New Guinea, but it also hosts Mah Jongg games and Tai Chi classes, provides outreach programs to 10,000 students in grades K-12, and acts as a gathering place for Asian-Americans and Asian-art enthusiasts near and far.
That’s what gives the Pacific Asia Museum a unique position as an educational institution and a community center, as well as being a repository for historic art. And its presence on the Web, with a site featuring interactive “Web modules,” including an award-winning program on Buddhist Art, only increases its global importance and its impact.
“The Web has leveled the playing field for museums,” said executive director Joan Marshall. “We’re a small institution, but we can have a broader reach.”
Whether visitors experience the museum online, through its in-school “Traveling Trunk” outreach program, or within its beautiful, quaint galleries, what they’re getting is a unique glimpse of the subtle similarities and differences between various Asian cultures—a luxury many of us miss when we visit encyclopedic art museums where pieces from Japan, China and Tibet are displayed together.
For example, a tour through the Southeast Asian and Indian Sculpture gallery (which is stunning with its red walls and glass cases with orange silk backdrops) highlights that the Buddha is a central theme in art from Vietnam, Thailand and Southeast Asia. But each culture renders the figure differently. In Southeast Asia, the Buddha is a dragon-like creature; while in Vietnam he is many-armed and fanciful. In Thailand, the Buddha is young, lean and hairless and wears a pointy hat. In none of these cultures is the Buddha the jolly, pot-bellied Chinese version many of us consider “traditional.”
Other galleries highlight the differences between objects within a culture. In the Chinese ceramics galleries, for example, it’s clear that the simplest clay and porcelain bowls, plates and incense burners were reserved for domestic use, while ornate, European-style versions were specific to the export business. In fact, the blue and white china many Western Europeans consider “authentic Chinese” was actually manufactured specifically for export. Similarly, the Japanese Decorative Arts gallery makes clear that the gold-adorned, almost gaudy porcelain figures (known as Satsuma) many of us associate with Japanese décor were also designed particularly for Western tastes—people in Japan preferred their art simpler and less ostentatious.
In fact, nearly every room serves to dispel common misconceptions and increase understanding about some aspect of Asian art or culture. This, said Marshall, is exactly the point.
“Education is the core of what we do,” she said, referring especially to the school outreach programs that bring trunks full of costumes, dolls and toys from Asian cultures to classrooms. The “Traveling Trunks” are accompanied by lesson plans and stories for teachers and are followed by docent-led tours and artist-led workshops at the museum. To make the program even more valuable, Marshall and other museum directors are trying to sync their programs with the California State education curriculum.
And for older students—of either academic institutions or life—a project is under way to photograph and catalog every object in the museum’s collection to post on the Internet. It’s an important project for scholars and the public, said Marshall, since many of the objects are too fragile to be sorted through by hand. And of course, the Web will give access to these valuable resources to more people, providing even more “intercultural understanding through the arts.”
Though 25 percent of the museum’s visitors are Asian, the institution is meant for the education and delight of all cultures. And Marshall, who came to the museum from the Autry Museum of Western Heritage two years ago, hopes to raise the profile of the museum in general. That’s why some brochures are tri-lingual—English, Spanish and Chinese.
In fact, the museum has a multicultural history. Grace Nicholson, a stenographer who moved to Pasadena in 1901 after her parents and grandparents both died, founded it. The young entrepreneur opened a typewriter shop on Raymond Street but became interested in Native American arts through her first two clients. Soon she’d transformed the building into a curio shop, selling Native American baskets and, later, Asian arts.
She documented her travels to remote Native American villages and to Asia and was named the first woman member of the American Anthropological Association in 1904. Though she started out so poor she had to wallpaper her home with burlap bags, by the early 1920s she was successful enough to purchase a two-story craftsman home on Los Robles Avenue. Her clients included John Muir, J.P. Morgan, and members of the Heinz, Kraft and Hearst families. By 1924, she had commissioned the architects responsible for what are now the Mayfield School and the Ambassador Hotel to build her a 32,000 square-foot Imperial Chinese palace with art galleries, living quarters and retail space.
“Her banker was horrified,” said Marshall. “But being conservative was never one of her traits.”
When she died in 1944, she donated the building to the city, and it was leased to the Pasadena Art Museum (a forerunner of the Museum of Contemporary Art). Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock and Marcel Duchamp all had exhibitions there before the organization moved to its current locat
ion and became the Norton Simon Museum. By the time the building became the Pacific Asia Museum in 1971, it already had a rich history.
And it seems Marshall, museum staff and trustees are continuing the legacy. The museum was the first in the United States to display contemporary art from China after the revolution, to show aboriginal art, and to display an exhibit of Tibetan furniture. A groundbreaking exhibit in the fall of 2006 will feature collaboration between Filipino, Chinese, Japanese and other cultural art alliances interpreting the theme of “food,” while other shows next year will look at the tradition of the geisha and 1,000 years of Thai art.
Marshall said there are also plans to expand and improve the museum. A campaign is under way to re-install half of the permanent collection, renovate the Japanese art gallery (to include interactive computer screens and a temple ceiling), and refurbish some of Nicholson’s living quarters, including a spectacular blue-walled library, a corner sitting room and the former dining room.
One of the ways the museum funds such projects is its annual Festival of the Autumn Moon in October, which, with its 1,000 guests, is the largest black-tie charity event in Pasadena. (This year’s theme will be “Serenade in the South Pacific.”) The event generates about half a million dollars for the museum, which, along with grants and other fundraisers, helps the museum fulfill its purpose.
“We have such a critical role to play in Southern California, one of the fastest growing Asian communities in the West,” said Marshall. “And we’re lucky to live in Pasadena. It’s a very civic-minded community.”
Upcoming exhibits include: “Brighter than Gold: The Rich Tradition of Satsuma Ware in Japan,” June 18 to August 15, and “From the Fire: Contemporary Korean Ceramics,” a traveling exhibition of over 100 contemporary Korean ceramics featuring the work of over 50 important ceramic artists, July 16 to October 16. Upcoming events include: “Authors on Asia,” featuring Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee with “Eating Korean: From Barbecue to Kimchi, Recipes from My Home” on Friday, July 22, and Ha Roda with “A Vietnamese Kitchen: Treasured Family Recipes” on Sunday, July 31. The museum is located at 46 N. Los Robles Ave., Pasadena. For more information, call (626) 449-2742, ext. 20, or visit www.pacificasiamuseum.org.
