World traveling through museums

This past weekend's museum challenge took me across the Seine and to another continent. Peter and I went to the Musée Guimet, the national museum of Asian arts, up in the 16th Arrondissement. Here, I rapidly realized just how poor my Asian geography knowledge really is as we toured through rooms on Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, Tibet, and India. We even got through portions of the Chinese art before the museum closed.

My visit to the Musée Guimet made me acutely aware of the gaping holes in my knowledge of Asian geography.

I loved seeing different cultures interpreting the same religious figures in their own styles and interpretations. Though we didn't have the chance to get audio guides for thorough explanations of the art, it was fascinating enough just to take in all the different, exotic cultural images.

A montage of the Musée Guimet

Top left: top, Visnu Narayana resting on the (five-headed) serpent of eternity, from Tamil Nadu, India, 17th-18th century. bottom, carved ivory, silver, and wood coffret, from Sri Lanka (formerly known as Ceylon), 17th century. Second from top left: Bodhisattva, or an enlightened being in Buddhism, from Indonesia, 8th or 9th century AD. Third from top left: Shiva, from Thailand. Second from top right: A lintel or supportive structure, from Cambodia, 9th century AD. Top right: Shiva Vinadhara dakshinamurti, Hindu Lord of Music, from Tamil Nadu, India, 11th century. Middle second to right: Dragon figure, from Vietnam, 12th-13th century. Middle right: Maha Vajra Bhairava, the Terminator of Death, the Buddhist figure who puts an end to the death-rebirth cycle through self-awakening and enlightenment, from Tibet or Mongolia, 16th or 17th century. Bottom left: Cakrasamrvara, a Tibetan Buddhist deity, and his wife pictured in their typical embrace symbolic of the "union of great bliss and emptiness, which are one and the same essence" (thank you, wikipedia), from Tibet, circa 1500 AD. Second from bottom left: Shiva, from Vietnam, 11th-12th century. Second to bottom right: two unidentified classically Asian horse sculptures. Bottom right: Headpiece of a Buddhist officiant, from Nepal, 1145 AD.

The museum was too big to get through in just an hour or two on one Saturday afternoon, but the location isn't too inconvenient to rule out a second tour before the end of my six-month museum challenge. Week #7: success.