Pacific Asia Museum

kw: travel notes, museums

Our second day in California, we slept in, then got together with my brother and visited the Pacific Asia Museum. He's probably the best museum guide on the planet. He has been to museums everywhere and knows his antiquities. He also knows many of the curators. However, Pacific Asia was new to him.

As a geologist and rockhound I was particularly interested in the Jade exhibits. This piece, about a foot (0.3m) tall, is Chinese. Two minerals go by the name Jade, jadeite and nephrite. Both minerals are hard, tough, and very thermally conductive—when you hold jade in your hand, it doesn't heat up quickly, compared to most stones.

Most jade from China is nephrite, while most jade from the United States is jadeite. Nephrite is a little easier to cut and carve, and is sometimes called "soft jade". The green color in this photo is very close to the real color of the stone; jade is famous for being hard to photograph, because its green color is often outside the color gamut of both film and digital imaging.

I once made a bracelet of several pieces of jadeite from Wyoming. My prior experience was making cabochons of agate, jasper or petrified wood, which are all forms of microcrystalline quartz. I was very pleased with the smooth cutting jade. Though it is also of hardness 7, somehow jade doesn't wear out a grinding wheel as quickly as quartz, and the cutting is easier to control.

The museum's collection is very comprehensive. However, because their name is Pacific Asia, they don't include any material from the Americas. That is little loss, because Pasadena is full of museums, such as the Norton Simon and Getty museums, that are chock full of Western art.

The major temporary exhibit, in which photography was not allowed (and I didn't cheat), traces the ethos of Samurai and Bushido in modern Manga, those thick, action-packed "comic books" from Japan that are becoming so popular here. But there were other exhibits from Japan, and my wife (who is Japanese) and brother (who spent half a year in Japan learning ivory carving) had a lot to say!

The most intriguing to me was an exhibit of netsuke, which are little fob-like objects, typically carved from the teeth of whales or swine—you'd be amazed how big a hog's tusk can get.

This is a closeup of a case with eighteen pieces. Though it is not evident in any of these, every piece has a hole in it, for stringing it. Something of value was on the other end of the string, and the netsuke would be slipped through a loop on one's costume, as a holdfast. The string could be used to retrieve the valuable object from a pocket, but guarded it from being dropped.

These days, netsuke (the word is both singular and plural) are valuable in their own right. It takes about 100 hours of carving for a skilled carver to produce one piece, and some intricate ones may take half a year to produce, 500-1000 hours! Good ivory carvers command more than minimum wage, so even a "common" piece will cost you US$1,000, or at current rates, ¥100,000 (The Japanese use a different Yen symbol when writing prices, but I don't know how to show it).

In the gift shop, they had a number of Tibetan singing bowls on sale, with wooden strokers. My brother showed me how to stroke the rim to produce the ringing sound for which they are famous—it is quite Philistine to just ding them with the stroker like it was a mallet. It takes a bit of pressure, and you drag the stroker around and around. Gradually a tone is heard, which can get quite loud with a minute or more of stroking. It is generated by a "circumferential mode", a vibration along the circumference of the bowl's rim. A truly unique sound, and so beautiful I can understand why the bowls are used to calm one's mind for meditation.

If you're ever in Pasadena (my home town!), look up this museum.