MUSEUMS
Bowers' new space conquest
Chinese art from several millenniums and photographs by Ansel Adams inaugurate a wing at the Santa Ana museum.
By Scarlet Cheng
Special to The Times
February 16, 2007
Seven years ago, Anne Shih was visiting the Shanghai Museum, a stronghold of Chinese art and antiquities, when she tossed out a suggestion to Director Chen Xiejun: What about an exhibition loan to the Bowers Museum in Santa Ana, where Shih is a board member? All right, she remembers Chen saying, if you can build a new space to house the show, we'll arrange it.
Today, not only is that new space built — 30,000 square feet at a cost of $15 million — but "Treasures From Shanghai: 5000 Years of Chinese Art and Culture" highlights its opening Sunday, the first day of the Chinese new year. A photography exhibition, "Ansel Adams: Classic Images," inaugurates a second gallery in the new wing.
On Main Street in Santa Ana, the Dorothy and Donald Kennedy wing spans half a block in glass, metal accents and a cladding of troweled plaster painted to match the existing architecture. The city opened the original Spanish-style museum in 1936 to feature Orange County history. In 1992, the Bowers reopened after an extensive remodeling that greatly expanded the facility, and it broadened its mission to showing a wide variety of art and artifacts. Bowers President Peter C. Keller pushed for the latest expansion, both to gain more exhibition space and to improve existing facilities. To pay for it, the museum obtained $4 million in state funding, with most of the remainder coming from private sources, including $2 million from benefactors Dorothy and Donald Kennedy. The latter is First American Corp. chairman emeritus and chairman of the Bowers' board of governors.
As of Sunday, museum admission, except for students, seniors and children younger than 5, will become uniformly $17 on weekdays and $19 on weekends — eliminating a general admission fee of $5. The latter was only for viewing a few permanent collections anyway, says Keller. "We're trying to simplify matters," he adds.
The new wing was designed by Robert R. Coffee Architect + Associates of Newport Beach. "We wanted to use materials that were compatible and more or less carried forward what was done in the past," Coffee said during a walk-through of the space last week as workers were still adding display cases and other finishing touches. "There was an effort to give an updated image, that we're moving into a new century and the museum is making a great transition."
Changing entrance
Formerly, visitors entered the museum via a courtyard off a side street. Today, a steel and glass canopy announces the new entrance on Main Street, and several apertures signal the museum's contents to passersby. Art and artifacts can be glimpsed through the glass wall that flanks the long corridor leading from entry foyer to the new wing. Farther along, an outcropped display window exhibits an elaborately carved wooden sarcophagus from 19th century Indonesia.
At the end of the corridor is a central atrium — a lofty 6,000 square feet that can be used for exhibitions as well as dinners and presentations — and beyond that is an enclosed garden with wall-mounted fountains. Radiating off the atrium are two new galleries, which provide an additional 10,000 square feet of exhibition space, and an acoustically balanced auditorium with 300 seats. Mahogany floors — "from certified sustainable sources," Coffee said — were selected for their durability and warmth of tone in an otherwise crisp, minimalist interior.
Developing relationship
Chen Kelun, assistant director of the Shanghai Museum and curator of the Chinese exhibition, says his museum's relationship with the Bowers has been developing since 2000. Speaking by telephone recently from Shanghai, he mentioned an exchange program in which the Bowers sends Orange County high school students to visit the Shanghai Museum as part of their docent training.
Although the Shanghai Museum has often sent works to group shows — including the Guggenheim Museum's blockbuster "China: 5,000 Years" in 1998 — it has not had a solo show, so to speak, in the continental U.S. since the late '80s, when an exhibition titled "The Chinese Scholar's Studio" made several U.S. stops.
In 2002, the museum signed the agreement for the Bowers exhibition, in exchange for which the Santa Ana museum pays a fee. After the Shanghai show concludes, Chen Kelun will curate a permanent exhibition of Chinese art for the same space, but from the Bowers' own collection. (The Bowers also has an agreement with the British Museum to share expenses and income from shows from that London institution. "Mummies: Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt," on view through Dec. 31, is part of that arrangement.)
The other new gallery will be used for rotating exhibitions. It launches with 75 Adams images that the noted photographer selected toward the end of his life and dubbed "The Museum Set." These are later prints of some of the dramatic landscapes that made him famous, including scenes from Yosemite and Sequoia national parks. In contrast to earlier prints, which had a softer look, "the more recent prints are less timid," Adams, who died in 1984, said. "I have sharply different vision now. The results are, perhaps, more dramatic." The collection is on loan from the Capital Group Foundation.
Chen Kelun said selecting the works for the Shanghai show wasn't difficult: "We got a brief from the Bowers — after all, they know what American audiences enjoy seeing — and then we went over the list together." The theme was art and culture in China over 5,000 years, "so we used these objects — bronze, ceramics, handicrafts, painting and calligraphy — to tell that story. Among Chinese museum collections, these are the areas we're quite strong in."
Shapes and eras
With the help of staff experts, he selected 77 sets of objects that represent historical eras as well as present a variety of shapes, patterns and sizes. "To have an art exhibition," he said, "we have to consider how the objects would display together."
Many prized and unusual objects were shipped, including Neolithic pottery and jade, bronze vessels from the Xia (18th to 16th century BC) to the early Han (206 BC to 8 AD) dynasties, ceramics from the Tang (618 to 907 AD) through the Ming (1368 to 1644 AD) dynasties, and a small sampling of paintings and calligraphy from the Ming and the Qing (1644 to 1911 AD) dynasties.
"The Bowers thought their audiences would be more interested in objects than in paintings and calligraphy," said Zhou Yanqun, a Shanghai Museum staff member in Santa Ana to install the show. To that end, two dozen exquisitely worked bronze pieces, dating back 2,000 to 4,000 years, are included. There is a complete set of bronze bells from the Early Spring and Autumn period (the 8th to the 7th century BC). They hang in descending order from a wooden beam and still produce pleasing tones, as Zhou Ya, the Shanghai Museum's curator of bronze, demonstrated. "Each bell was designed to play two notes," he said, striking one on two surfaces with his knuckles.
Elsewhere, a wine vessel dating from the same period is unusual for its prominent dragon-shaped handles. "This piece is extremely rare," said Chen Kelun. "It's quite large, so it's a wine server — wine would be put into it and ladled out." He adds that many of these ancient pieces are in such good condition because they were burial objects. The ancient Chinese believed in an afterlife, he said, "so they prepared for themselves the things they would need to have in the next world."
Kinds of appeal
Even works on paper were selected as much for their popular as for their art historical appeal. The two hanging calligraphy scrolls feature a free-flowing style one can admire for its energetic strokes without being able to read the characters.
A hand scroll depicting palace life in the Tang dynasty (but painted during the Ming) is unfurled to unveil an unusual but strangely familiar subject: Court ladies in diaphanous robes are shown swinging what look very much like golf clubs to get a little ball into a little hole in the ground. Apparently, Tang ladies had both the leisure and the freedom to indulge in the sporting life.
While discussing the dragon-handled wine vessels, Chen Kelun interjected a bit of contemporary history.
"Can I tell you an interesting little sidebar?" he asked. "There's a pair of these vessels — the other one is here at our museum. At the end of the 1960s, during the height of the Cultural Revolution, these objects were considered garbage from feudal times, so they were often sent to the scrap heap."
Fortunately, museum workers managed to salvage the body of the vessels, although they realized from the broken edges that the "ears" — the handles — were missing. Two years later, they found four dragon-shaped pieces from the same scrap heap. When they placed them onto the sides of the vessels, it was a perfect fit.
And what is the official opinion today of these objects from China's feudal past?
"Oh, now they're treasures!" Chen said with a small laugh.
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'Treasures From Shanghai' and 'Ansel Adams: Classic Images'
Where: Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, 2002 N. Main St., Santa Ana
When: 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays; closed Mondays.
Ends: Aug. 19 for "Treasures From Shanghai"; May 13 for "Ansel Adams"
Price: $12 to $19; children younger than 5 free
Contact: (714) 567-3600;
www.bowers.org