A Visit to the Seattle Asian Art Museum

I’ve been to Volunteer Park several times since we moved to Seattle, but usually I’ve been there to walk the trails and enjoy the view of the Olympic Mountains in the distance. Last week, however, my husband and I finally toured the Seattle Asian Art Museum, which is located on the park’s grounds.

The building was built in 1933 in the Art Deco style and was originally the home of the Seattle Art Museum. When the Seattle Art Museum moved downtown in 1991, the Volunteer Park building was remodeled and eventually became the home of the Seattle Asian Art Museum, a branch of the Seattle Art Museum. The remodeled museum features walls of glass that look out on the park—making nature part of the museum’s exhibits.

The museum’s collection includes art from China, Japan, Korea, India, the Himalayas, and Southeast Asia. There are paintings, sculptures, ceramics, textiles, prints, and other decorative arts. The exhibits are arranged more by theme than by geography, so visitors can see how different cultures approached similar subjects and artistic traditions.

The Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City also has a remarkable collection of Asian art, and I have wandered through those galleries several times over my years in Kansas City. I was interested to see how the two museums compare. The Nelson-Atkins collection is impressive in its variety and sheer number of exhibits. But the Seattle museum has plenty to see, and the exhibits are displayed to emphasize each item shown. I could appreciate each object that caught my attention without worrying I wouldn’t be able to see everything.

Neither my husband nor I know much about Asian art, but we know what we like. I am always attracted to blue-and-white porcelain, and there were several lovely examples, both in the permanent collection and in the current special exhibit, The Kondō Family: Storytellers in Clay. This exhibit featured the work of four Japanese ceramic artists from three generations of the Kondō family.

I was also impressed with the Japanese woodblock prints by Yoshida Hiroshi. One of his prints surprised me—the subject was Mount Rainier, from his United States Series. I expected to see Mount Fuji, which was represented, but I didn’t expect to see Mount Rainier in a museum of Asian art.

I had only two complaints about the museum. One is that there is only one small elevator for visitors with wheelchairs or walkers, and my husband now uses a walker outside our apartment. The other is that there is no café—or even an area where visitors can sit and eat. These are small matters, though. The museum is adequately accessible, even if accessibility was not top-of-mind when the building was remodeled. And, after all, the purpose of a museum is to feed one’s imagination with art, not one’s body.

The Seattle Asian Art Museum was well worth a visit, and I’m sure I’ll be back there again.

When have you visited a museum and found something that surprised you? What was it?