Asian Portraits Grace Washington's Sackler Gallery

New exhibition opens at the Smithsonian

The conventional view that Asia has no portraiture tradition is challenged by Facing East: Portraits from Asia, an exhibition currently at the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington.

Drawing from the Chinese, Japanese, South Asian, Islamic and ancient Near East art collections, the museum has assembled 70 unusual portraits executed in media as diverse as paper, porcelain and stone.

The works span several millennia. A stylized Egyptian pharaoh's head (circa 2500-2160 B.C.) is sculpted with naturalistic features that hint at how this Old Kingdom ruler might have looked in life. The power and status of a Persian king are communicated by the dynamic image of him hunting game on horseback, engraved on a silver-and-gilt plate from Iran's Sassanian period (300-400). Portraits from India include Mughal emperors, court ladies and militia. Modern portraiture is represented by photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries.

The exhibit is organized into three main categories designed to explore how personal identity has been represented in Asian art: Portraits and Memory, Likeness and Identity and Projecting Identity. These include collective, individual and sacred depictions.

The Pilgrim of Mashhad, drawn by Riza Abbasi in 1598, during the Safavid dynasty in Iran, is as candid as a photograph. The artist met the subject during the holy month of Muharram, in Mashhad, burial place of the eighth Shi'ite imam. He sketched the man in a spontaneous moment, turban off, scratching his head. An inscription describes the moment, noting it was done "in the company of friends ... written by Riza."

The group portrait of Indian army soldiers, Six Recruits from the Fraser Album (1815-1816), attributed to Ghulam Ali Khan, is rendered with consummate attention to detail and the individual characters of the subjects. The artist indicates the diversity of the localities from which the men hailed by their distinctive manners of dress. One wears the yellow uniform of Skinner's Horse, a regiment founded by the colorful adventurer James Skinner. William Fraser, a political agent for the British East India Company, commissioned the watercolor.

Photos by Antoin Sevruguin, including Veiled Woman, introduce the modern era of portraiture in near Asia. Sevruguin exhaustively documented Iran as an official photographer of the imperial court. He also ran a successful commercial studio in Teheran from the mid-1800s to 1933. Innovative contemporary photos are exemplified by Untitled, by Iraqi photographer Jannane al-Ani, who conveys generational and cultural changes through a group portrait of her mother, her three sisters and herself (1996).

The Sackler Gallery was founded in 1987 with 1,000 objects of Asian art donated by Arthur M. Sackler, who also gave $4 million in seed money to construct the building. In the Sackler and the adjacent Freer Gallery, the Smithsonian Institution houses the national collections of Asian art for the United States.

The museum offers lectures, performances and other public events that deepen the cultural experience of the exhibitions. Facing East runs until September 4. Additional information and photographs are available on the Smithsonian's Web site.

Source: U.S. Department of State

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