View more than 2, Asian Art objects currently on display in the galleries, or browse the collection by cultural area below. The Met collection of Chinese painting and calligraphy ranks among the finest outside China, with masterpieces dating from the eighth to the twenty-first centuries. Another great strength is the collection of Chinese Buddhist sculpture from the fifth through the nineteenth century. The collections of antiquities and works of art range from the third millennium B. An often visited area of the Museum is the Astor Court, modeled after a courtyard in a seventeenth-century domestic residence in Suzhou, a city famous for its gardens. Opening onto the courtyard is a room displaying hardwood furniture of the same period.

Metalwork by Goto Teijo, 9th generation Goto master, Japan. East Asian lacquer is a resin made from the highly toxic sap of the Rhus verniciflua tree, which is native to the area and a close relative of poison ivy. In essence, lacquer is a natural plastic; it is remarkably resistant to water, acid, and, to a certain extent, heat. Raw lacquer is collected annually by extracting the viscous sap through notches cut into the trees. It is gently heated to remove excess moisture and impurities.

Or that they continue to mirror changing times, a changing museum and a changing Asia, though they do. Hearn, replaces James C. Watt as head of the Asian art department. Hearn — everyone calls him Mike — is 61 and a native of Salt Lake City. He arrived at the Met fresh out of college in , when there barely was an Asian department and the Asian collection consisted of a room of Buddhist sculptures and a bunch of ceramic pots.

The Met's collection of art of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands, and North, Central, and South America comprises more than eleven thousand works of art of varied materials and types, representing diverse cultural traditions from as early as B. Highlights include decorative and ceremonial objects from the Court of Benin in Nigeria; sculpture from West and Central Africa; images of gods, ancestors, and spirits from New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Polynesia, and Island Southeast Asia; and objects of gold, ceramic, and stone from the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico and Central and South America. The Met began to acquire works of ancient American art in the 19th century, but the Department of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas was not established until with the promised gift of Nelson A. The Rockefeller gift offer included more than three thousand works of art; a specialized library the Robert Goldwater Library ; and the Visual Resource Archive, which documents, in various formats, the art and culture of the regions represented by the department. In , the Michael C.