At the San Francisco Asian Art Museum I saw installations by two Korean sculptors reinterpreting traditional ceramic forms. The first four photos are views of a single large case crammed with purple-tinted iridescent vessels, all of them rendered in soap and coated with varnish by a young woman named Meekyoung Shin.
The four photos that follow give views of Meekyoung Shin's second piece, located in the colonnade. This one is called Soap "ceramics" from the Translation Series. It pretends to be a shipment of precious vessels in the midst of uncrating at a museum such as this one.
Also in the colonnade as seen below is Yeesookyung's From the Translated Vases Series, 2011. She took broken pieces of newly-made Korean whiteware porcelain and stuck them together with a special "gilded adhesive" to create these blue-and-white statues.
Finally I walked through the vast empty room that housed the very vast card catalog when I first knew this building during its time as the San Francisco Public Library. The Asian Art Museum keeps all kinds of activities rotating through here, so it's a little unusual to find it quietly shining like this in contented vacancy.
One of those red Italian sofas is the one (in a different position) on which Mabel Watson Payne once famously posed here.
Around the doors in the catalog room are these elaborate bronze frames featuring mottoes in large raised letters, all caps:
IN BOOKS LIES THE SOUL OF THE
WHOLE PAST TIME: THE ARTICULATE
AUDIBLE VOICE OF THE PAST
WHOLE PAST TIME: THE ARTICULATE
AUDIBLE VOICE OF THE PAST