By Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic
“Tibet: Treasures From the Roof of the World” at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco will probably disappoint only visitors who remember too well the Asian’s 1991 exhibition “Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet.”
“Wisdom and Compassion” set a nearly unsurpassable standard. The 1991 show, at the museum’s former site in Golden Gate Park, drew extensively on public and private collections in Europe, Russia and the United States.
The current exhibition comes entirely from institutions in Tibet: the Potala Palace, the Tibet Museum and the Norbulingka Collection. Surprisingly, to judge by the contrast between the two shows, the finer material, in artistic terms, resides in the West.
“Wisdom and Compassion,” as its title hints, gave an almost proselytizing emphasis to the tenets of Buddhist belief and their manifestation in the iconography of Tibetan painting and sculpture. The show’s catalog instantly became a valued resource for anyone wishing to delve deeply into the aesthetics, history and meaning of Tibetan art.
“Tibet,” true to its title, is a “treasures” exhibition, an array of startling rarities, light on information, that will take its forgettable place in the seemingly endless parade of museum events that seek a mass audience. Besides paintings and sculpture, it includes ritual implements, costumes and remarkable items such as a set of antique surgical instruments and a giant lock from the Potala Palace, the winter home of every Dalai Lama from the mid- 17th to the mid-20th centuries.
“Wisdom and Compassion” had a certain snob appeal. Its ambition went beyond education to the cultivation of connoisseurship, which may have intimidated as many visitors as it rewarded.
“Tibet: Treasures From the Roof of the World” puts up no intellectual hurdles. People will find its catalog and wall text thin by comparison to those of the earlier exhibition, but far more accessible.
As a book, though, the catalog to “Tibet” is an inexcusably crude product:
confusing in design, marred throughout by a jumpy imbalance between thumbnail reproductions and in-your-face, out-of-focus details.
A final and disquieting point of comparison: “Wisdom and Compassion,” which the Asian organized, tacitly championed the cause of Tibetan autonomy, 40 years after the country’s annexation by the China. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s nominal spiritual and political leader, has held sway in exile since 1959. He inaugurated the 1991 show with an appearance and wrote a message for the catalog.
If “Wisdom and Compassion” had as a subtext a plea for solidarity with the cause of Tibetan autonomy, “Tibet: Treasures From the Roof of the World” faintly suggests that the issue has faded away.
Apart from acknowledgment of China’s invasion and the present Dalai Lama’s exile in the final paragraphs of Robert W. Clark’s catalog essay, the indigenous Tibetans’ unsettled fate goes almost unmentioned. The exhibition’s content happens to emphasize the luxurious diplomatic gifts between Chinese (and Manchu and Mongol) rulers and Dalai Lamas of the distant past.
Should a museum take an implicit or explicit political stand on a fraught matter such as Tibetan independence? Probably not. It could lead to controversies dangerous to the very survival of such institutions, which struggle hard enough in the post-culture-war era.
But neither the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana, which originated the present exhibition, nor the Asian, whose curator Terese Tse Bartholomew contributed heavily to it, has made clear enough the shadow that recent history casts on the subject under study.
All that said, “Tibet: Treasures From the Roof of the World” naturally stirs curiosity by the mere fact that the present Dalai Lama, in common with his predecessors — or his previous incarnations, as Buddhist belief has it — once owned a number of the things on view.
Wall text explains well such matters as the various Tibetan Buddhist orders and the entwining of Tibet’s history with the iconography and lore of Buddhism.
Labels and catalog text also provide interpretive points of entry into the maze of a bewilderingly complex image such as the 18th century textile “Chakrasamvara.”
Although Tibetan Buddhist iconography endured almost unchanged for many centuries, visitors may feel a subtle loss of profound feeling in the objects made outside Tibet and closer in time to our own era.
Does this loss, or modulation, reflect some remote pressure of modernity on the isolated Himalayan realm or on Buddhist belief? Does it correlate with the disparate origins of objects in monasteries, or temple or imperial workshops?
“Tibet: Treasures From the Roof of the World” leaves such questions to us.
Tibet: Treasures From the Roof of the World: Paintings, sculpture, textiles, manuscripts and ritual artifacts. Through Sept. 11. Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, 200 Larkin St., San Francisco. (415) 581-3500, www.asianart.org.
