Drawn from the exceptional collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and his family foundation, Global Asias examines the cosmopolitan, playful, and subtly subversive characteristics of contemporary Asian and Asian American art. The exhibition highlights the work of fifteen artists of Asian heritage who draw on a rich array of motifs and cultural motivations to construct complex identities in a modern global context. 

What do we mean by Global Asias? Is it a place? An idea? This exhibition moves us away from considering Asia as a geographical location and instead invites us to think broadly about how “Asia” has long served as an imaginative construct. By focusing on the conceptual dimensions of Asia—and in thinking about 

Asia not in singular but plural terms—Global Asias encourages us to recognize the power of imagination in constructing Asia as a site of meaning across the globe. 

The exhibition features 45 works and is divided into three thematic sections. Exuberant Forms features works that reshape and challenge conventional views of abstract art by exploring new materials, techniques, and metaphors. Moving Stories encourages viewers to reflect on the experiences of migration, both within Asia and beyond. Asias Reinvented highlights works that transform styles and motifs of traditional Asian art to engage, probe, and critique contemporary popular culture and politics. Combined, the works in Global Asias suggest the plurality and fluidity of “Asia” as cultural construct and creative practice. 

Artists included in Global Asias are:

Kwang Young Chun
Jacob Hashimoto
Manabu Ikeda
Jun Kaneko
Dinh Q. Lê
Hung Liu
Mariko Mori
Hiroki Morinoue
Takashi Murakami
Roger Shimomura
Do Ho Suh
Akio Takamori
Barbara Takenaga
Rirkrit Tiravanija
Patti Warashina 

Organized by the Palmer Museum of Art in association with the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, Global Asias was guest curated by Dr. Chang Tan, assistant professor of art history and Asian studies, and will embark on a national tour in 2022. 

Support for the exhibition and related educational and outreach programs has been made possibly by a grant from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. Additional funding provided by Penn State’s Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost as part of the University’s Strategic Arts and Humanities Initiative.

Virtual Tour: Global Asias

Explore Global Asias from home. This web-based, interactive program features guided video tours of selected exhibition artists in addition to an introductory overview by the curator. Learn about the “Global Asias” concept of personal and cultural identity in a contemporary world.

Artists featured include: Jacob Hashimoto, Dinh Q. Lê, Hung Liu, Takashi Murakami, Roger Shimomura, Do Ho Suh, and Rirkrit Tiranvanija.

Click here to experience the Global Asias Virtual Tour

Community Voices from Global Asias

Development of Global Asias took place during a time when the United States saw an alarming increase in hostility and violence towards people of Asian descent. As a way to reconcile this disturbing trend with the exhibition’s exploration of the multiple and interconnected Asian diasporas, the Palmer staff invited community members of Asian descent to contribute their personal perspectives. Members of the Penn State community offered insights and stories about their experiences of what it means to be identified as “Asian” or “Asian American.”

Click here to listen to Community Voices

Global Asias Educator Resource Packet

This resource packet introduces K-12 educators to online resources and lesson plans that explore artists, concepts, and themes featured in Global Asias.

Click here for a link to download the Global Asias Educator Resource Packet.

For additional information on Global Asias, click here to check out our online media room.

The art of ukiyo-e flourished in Japan during the Edo period (1615–1867), an era characterized by the introduction and growth of a literate and sophisticated merchant class in the country’s urban centers, particularly in the city of Edo, modern-day Tokyo. Barred from foreign travel by the ruling shoguns, members of this group focused their attention on local amusements, frequenting the theater, visiting brothels, and adopting contemporary fashions and attitudes. This life of contemporary pleasure came to be known as ukiyo, or the “floating world,” as though one might drift through life in a manner of a leaf floating downstream. Likewise, artists of the period turned increasingly toward the representation of this new subject matter, specializing in genre scenes, portraits of actors and courtesans, and later, landscape. Their work became known as ukiyo-e, or “pictures of the floating world.”  

Ukiyo-e: Images of the Floating World features seventeen Japanese woodblock prints that were given to the Palmer Museum over many years by Penn State alumnus William E. Harkins (’42).  

Organized by the Palmer Museum of Art. 

Place to Place offers a jaunt around America in the first half of the twentieth century. From New York to New Mexico to New Orleans, a range of sites in several different media are gathered to explore notions of place. International locales represented include Belgium, England, France, Germany, and Morocco. Conceived at a time when many of us were stuck in place because of the pandemic, this exhibition presents disparate geographical locales depicted by a variety of peripatetic artists, including Colin Campbell Cooper, Marsden Hartley, Charles Webster Hawthorne, Robert Henri, Irene Rice Pereira, and Alice Schille. The twenty-three drawings and watercolors featured have been given to the museum in the last few years and will be on view for the first time. Organized by the Palmer Museum of Art.

The Benjamin and Lillian K. Snowiss Galleries feature American painting and sculpture from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Displayed in three galleries, this core collection of the Palmer Museum’s holdings surveys the major artistic developments in the United States, especially portraiture from the Early Republic, Hudson River School landscapes, genre painting before and after the Civil War, and various cosmopolitan styles of the Gilded Age.

Currently on view in the Snowiss Gallery, you can view a rare and new acquisition for the museum, Grafton Tyler Brown’s Hot Springs at Yellowstone. Read about the important artwork here: https://news.psu.edu/story/650334/2021/03/09/arts-and-entertainment/palmer-museum-art-acquires-rare-and-important-work

The Harold L. and Edythe B. Tonkin Gallery showcases the Palmer Museum’s impressive holdings of contemporary studio glass and ceramics from around the world. On view are objects of dazzling variety and techniques by pioneering artists in the field of studio glass, as well as artists working in glass today from North America, England, Italy, Scandinavia, the Czech Republic, and Japan. The museum’s ceramics collection includes examples from ancient Andean cultures, from historical China and Korea, and from twentieth-century Europe and Japan.