Past Exhibitions | Smithsonian Institution

Delighting Krishna: Paintings of the Child-God

Delighting Krishna delves into the emotions and philosophy of the Pushtimarg tradition and the ingenuity of its artists.

March 15, 2025 – August 24, 2025

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Body Transformed: Contemporary South Asian Photographs and Prints

The human form and the expressive power of photography and print media offer ways to examine the place of the individual in contemporary society.

February 15, 2025 – August 17, 2025

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

The Print Generation

The Print Generation presents a selection of creative prints that challenged the dominant narrative of what it meant to be an artist in twentieth-century Japan.

November 16, 2024 – April 27, 2025

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

An Epic of Kings: The Great Mongol Shahnama

An Epic of Kings offers a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see twenty-five folios from the now dismantled manuscript—the Great Mongol Shahnama.

September 21, 2024 – January 12, 2025

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Park Chan-kyong: Gathering

The exhibition features a range of works that highlight Park’s masterful use of the photographic medium to explore the enduring traces of tradition, history, and disaster in contemporary society.

October 7, 2023 – October 14, 2024

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Staging the Supernatural: Ghosts and the Theater in Japanese Prints

Staging the Supernatural brings together a collection of vibrant, colorful woodblock prints and illustrated books depicting the porous boundary between the real world and the world of supernatural beings in Japanese cultural history.

March 23, 2024 – October 6, 2024

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Anyang: China's Ancient City of Kings

Anyang: China’s Ancient City of Kings features over two hundred remarkable artifacts from the museum’s permanent collection.

February 25, 2023 – April 28, 2024

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Palace Life Unfolds: Conserving a Chinese Lacquer Screen

On display for the first time since 1976 after a major conservation project, this Chinese lacquer screen dated to 1672 is a delight, featuring newly revealed intricate details that had been obscured by centuries of wear and use.

July 15, 2023 – January 28, 2024

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Ay-Ō's Happy Rainbow Hell

Immerse yourself in Ay-Ō’s world of sensory experience, exploration, and fun. This exhibition contains material not appropriate for all audiences. Parental discretion is advised.

March 25, 2023 – September 10, 2023

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Unstill Waters: Contemporary Photography from India

Through still and moving image, seriality, and portraiture, five leading contemporary artists explore rapidly changing natural and built environments in India, from riverbanks, ancient forests, and city streets to surreal symbolic settings.

December 10, 2022 – June 11, 2023

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

A Splendid Land: Paintings from Royal Udaipur

With dazzling paintings on paper and cloth A Splendid Land reveals how artists conveyed emotions, depicted places, celebrated water resources, and fostered personal bonds over some two hundred years in the rapidly changing political and cultural landscapes of early modern South Asia.

November 19, 2022 – May 14, 2023

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Underdogs and Antiheroes: Japanese Prints from the Moskowitz Collection

Expect the unexpected. The exhibition focuses on the captivating stories and urban legends of individuals living on the fringes of society in early modern Japan.

March 19, 2022 – January 29, 2023

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Living in Two Times: Photography by Bahman Jalali and Rana Javadi

Noted for their sharp documentary images and haunting photomontage works, the artists are among the most influential figures in the development of late twentieth-century photography in Iran.

August 6, 2022 – January 8, 2023

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Once Upon a Roof: Vanished Korean Architecture

One special type of ornamented roof tile is the focus of this exhibition.Called chimi in Korea, these impressive features crowned both ends of the main roof ridge of prominent buildings.

May 21, 2022 – October 30, 2022

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Revealing Krishna: Journey to Cambodia's Sacred Mountain

Revealing Krishna transports visitors to a sacred mountain in the floodplains of southern Cambodia.

April 30, 2022 – September 18, 2022

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Fashioning an Empire: Safavid Textiles from the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha

This exhibition focuses on a selection of extraordinary seventeenth-century textiles and full-length portraits from Safavid Iran. Fine illustrated manuscript folios from our collections are also included in the exhibition.

December 18, 2021 – May 15, 2022

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Encountering the Buddha: Art and Practice Across Asia

Visitors can step into a Tibetan Buddhist shrine, linger at a Sri Lankan stupa, travel with an eighth-century Korean monk and discover remarkable objects in Encountering the Buddha.

October 14, 2017 – February 6, 2022

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Power in Southeast Asia

Through a range of local styles, techniques, and materials, the artworks in this exhibition reveal understandings of power in Southeast Asia.

October 21, 2017 – June 1, 2021

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Resound: Bells of Ancient China

Re-sound investigates oval-shaped bells with displays of early instruments including a graduated set of matched bells discovered together in a Chinese tomb, videos of ancient bells being played, and chances for visitors to compose their own music on virtual bronze bells.

October 14, 2017 – March 13, 2020

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Sacred Dedication: A Korean Buddhist Masterpiece

This small focus exhibition features a 13th-century Goryeo-dynasty Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara and the dedication materials found within it. On loan from the National Museum of Korea.

September 21, 2019 – March 13, 2020

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Gods, Companions, and Devotees

Hinduism is a living religion with complex roots reaching back more than four thousand years. Its three major deities—the gods Shiva and Vishnu and the goddess with multiple names—each take on many forms.

May 23, 2017 – March 13, 2020

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Age Old Cities: A Virtual Journey from Palmyra to Mosul

This exhibition immerses visitors in the history and splendor of three Arab World cities which are major centers of world heritage—Mosul, Aleppo, and Palmyra.

January 25, 2020 – March 13, 2020

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

A Glimpse of Ancient Yemen

A Glimpse of Ancient Yemen highlights a small selection of objects that were excavated from the region by the pioneer archaeologist Wendell Phillips and his team in 1950 and 1951.

August 18, 2018 – March 13, 2020

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Shaping Clay in Ancient Iran

This exhibition of ceramics produced in northwestern Iran highlights animal-shaped vessels as well as jars and bowls decorated with animal figures.

September 8, 2018 – March 13, 2020

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery

Xu Bing: Monkeys Grasp for the Moon

This whimsical sculpture, hanging from the atrium to the refllecting pool, is composed of 21 laminated wood pieces, with each forming the word "monkey" in a dozen different languages.

October 14, 2017 – March 13, 2020

Asian Art Museum Sackler Gallery