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Asian Orientations: Treasures from Honolulu's Oriental Art Society

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As exhibition catalogs go, "Asian Orientations" has a rather cozy feel. Designed to accompany a 1985 exhibition at the Honolulu Academy of Arts by that city's Oriental Art Society, the book seems to partake of the congenial eclecticism of this informal gathering of Asian art collectors as they share with us some of their prize pieces and tell us a little about them in plain, informative prose. No overall theme, but there's a little bit of everything, so that an Esoteric Buddhist ritual implement from medieval times and an early modern candy box designed by Shibata Zeshin can share the same page without raising an eyebrow. The works represented are primarily East Asian (mostly Chinese and Japanese, with merely a handful of Korean items), though a few works from India and Southeast Asia are present as well.

All in all, the original exhibit included 258 artworks. Each of these is listed herein and accompanied with a description of varying length from basic data on provenance and date to whole little explanatory essays. Frustratingly, though, only a fraction of these artworks are actually pictured, which comes to 57 color illustrations and 70 black-and-white ones (a few of these illustrations are of several objects arrayed, of course). On the plus side, these are relatively nice reproductions of some intriguing and wonderful works of art. And whether your particular interest is in color prints by Katsushika Hokusai or fine Chinese porcelain, ancient Indian Buddhist iconography or ivory netsuke from Japan, surely something within these pages will catch your eye.