American art museums follow the money trail to Asia

The makeup of trustees on the boards of many high-profile American museums is changing as they search the globe for patrons with deeps pockets. The addition of Russian and Latin American billionaires like Leohnid Mikhelson, Vladmir Potanin (or their associates like Roman Abramovich's partner Dasha Zhukova), Alejando Santo Domingo, Eugenio Lopez is a fairly commonplace, but these days the money trail is also leading them to Asia with New York's Asia Society leading the way. Twelve of the Society's forty-five trustees are non-American, hailing from China, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, and in 2011 it named Hong Kong property billionaire Ronnie Chan as co-chair of the board, which also includes Indian billionaire Jamshyd N Godrej.

Image: Ronnie Chan

Asia Society opens a satellite in China

Scheduled to open next month, the Asia Society Hong Kong is the first American museum satellite to be launched in China. Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects have transformed a campus of four heritage buildings built by the British army in the mid-nineteenth century and added a new wing connected to the heritage buildings by a double-decker walkway.

Following the vision of Asia Society founder John D Rockefeller to promote the understanding of Asian culture, the museum will open with Transforming Minds: Buddhism in Art showcasing 6th-century relics from Rockefeller's collection together with work by contemporary Asian American artists.
Images: The $49.5m Asia Society Hong Kong by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects

Asia Society presents Ai Weiwei's New York photography

Following the public opening of Ai Weiwei's Circle of Animal/Zodiac Heads at the Pulitzer Fountain, New York's Asia Society is set to open a large show of his photographic work, featuring 227 photos he took during his New York days. The exhibition runs from 29 June to 14 August 2011. Read more...

Image: Ai Weiwei's Dropping a Han Dynsaty Urn, 1995