General Asian Art Resources
Art History Resources for East Asian Art
Asia Art Archive
With one of the most valuable growing collections of material on the recent history of art from Asia, freely available from our website and onsite library, AAA builds tools and communities to collectively expand knowledge through research, residency, educational programs, and publications.
ASIANetwork (Promoting Asia in the Liberal Arts)
A consortium of over 140 North American colleges, strives to strengthen the role of Asian Studies within the framework of liberal arts education to help prepare succeeding generations of undergraduates for a world in which Asian societies play prominent roles in an ever more interdependent world. On this site, you will find information relevant to ASIANetwork members, including ASIANetwork Programs, Conferences, Publications, and Membership.
Asian Export Collection
Part of the Peabody Essex Museum, PEM holds the largest and most comprehensive collection in the world of transcultural works by Asian artists who catered to diverse markets around the globe.
Asian Historical Architecture
A photographic survey of Asian architecture heritage, history, and styles. Here you can view over 51,000 photos of 1,724 sites in twenty-three countries, with extensive background information. This website is a collection of 100% original photos, descriptions, and historical information from many contributors.
Asia in Art – Online Museum Resources of Asian Art
An initiative of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University, Asia for Educators (AFE) is designed to serve faculty and students in world history, culture, geography, art, and literature at the undergraduate and pre-college levels. Part of the National Consortium for Teaching about Asia (NCTA).
East Asian Scroll Paintings, from the University of Chicago Center for Art of East Asia
Interactive site to simulate the experience of viewing handscrolls in ways that published photographs in books and projected slides cannot and to make them more widely accessible for teaching and research.
The Huntington Photographic Archive of Buddhist and Asian Art
represents forty years of field documentation photography by the Huntingtons. In 1986, the two History of Art professors at The Ohio State University formally expanded their photographic collection. Partnering with the History of Art department, the Huntingtons created an institutional archive to house images of art from countries central to their personal research, as well as other areas of the Buddhist world. The Huntington Archive is devoted to providing pan-Asian documentation and resource materials for scholarly research and classroom teaching.
Kimbell Art Museum’s Asian art collection
Small, focused collection of Asian Art
Knoop Far East Photographic Collection
A collection of approximately 1,600 photographic images, some duplicated, assembled by Douglas Knoop on a world tour 1913 – 1914. The images cover natural features, human interest such as street scenes, and major events such as earthquakes, as well as incidental events on the tour (e.g. on board ship). The countries recorded include India, Ceylon, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, China, Korea and Japan, but there are also some images of other places visited on the journey, including the Russian Far East and the USA.
National Museum of Asian Art
Part of the Smithsonian Museums.
Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies
Extensive list of resources on Buddhism.
Japanese
Azito
Online gallery of Japanese contemporary art
ColBase
is a database containing the collections of the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, Japan. It encompasses the four National Museums in Tokyo, Kyoto, Nara, and Kyushu, the two National Research Institutes for Cultural Properties in Tokyo and Nara, and the Museum of the Imperial Collections, Sannomaru Shozokan.
Digital Scrolling Paintings Project
Center for the Art of East Asia and the University of Chicago project allowing viewers to move freely through painted scrolls.
The Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project (DCADP)
is an initiative spearheaded by the University of Chicago’s Center for the Art of East Asia that uses modern technologies to digitally reconstruct damaged works of art and virtually place these reconstructed models back in their original spatial contexts.
Duke University Libraries
Japanese Studies Art History research guides
e-Museum
This site provides high-definition images of the National Treasures and Important Cultural Properties owned by the Tokyo National Museum, Kyoto National Museum, Nara National Museum, Kyushu National Museum and the Nara National Research Institute for Cultural Properties aligned under the National Institutes for Cultural Heritage, together with their descriptions in multiple languages (Japanese, English, Chinese and Korean).
Yōkai Senjafuda, University of Oregon
Digital exhibition focusing on tiny slips of paper (senjafuda) that depict Japanese ghosts and monsters (yokai).
Hachiman Digital Handscrolls Project
Harvard University Projects
Petzold Scrolls Collection
JAANUS
This dictionary contains approximately 8000 terms related to traditional Japanese architecture and gardens, painting, sculpture and art-historical iconography from approximately the 1st century A.D. to the end of the Edo period (1868). Terms from related fields such as lacquer, ceramics, textiles and metalwork have been included where they are considered to be of general interest and/or impact on the principal fields of architecture, painting and sculpture. These definitions are not translations from any one Japanese monolingual dictionary, but have been collated from a range of specialist sources and scholarly publications, and from direct observation and study. Many have never before been defined in English.
Japan Archives: 1850-2100
An archive of illustrated print material on current news, culture, leisure, nature, and landscape.
Japanese Buddhist Statuary
Photo dictionary of Japanese religious sculpture and art relating to Buddhism and Shintōism
Meiji and Taisho Eras in Photographs
Nagasaki University Library
Japanese Old Photographs of the Bakumatsu-Meiji Periods
Nara National Museum
The Nara National Museum is located in a corner of Nara Park surrounded by the Tōdai-ji Temple, the Kōfuku-ji Temple, and the Kasuga Taisha Shrine. With the cooperation of temples, shrines, and other cultural properties’ owners, we conserve and study cultural properties, including artworks and archeological artifacts related to Buddhist art. We also hold exhibitions to encourage the understanding of the quality of and fascination with Buddhist art cultivated through deep faith in Buddhism, as well as the profound culture and historical background of Buddhist art.
Noel Chiappa’s Page
Contains a number of links on Japanese woodblock printing. Scroll further down the page to find the links on printing.
OSU: Photographs, Japan & The Allied Occupation
Smithsonian Libraries-Japanese Illustrated Books
The National Museum of Asian Art Library’s collection of illustrated Japanese rare books includes over 1,000 volumes previously owned by Charles Lang Freer. Often filled with color illustrations, many are by famous artists such as Andō Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai. Recently added to the Library’s collections consists of 67 volumes of illustrated Meiji-period books collected by Robert O. Muller
Smithonian Video
Ukiyo-e Style printmaking with demonstration by mast printmaker Kenji Shinohara
Tokyo National Museum
Virtual collection
Ukiyo-e Search
Japanese Woodblock Print Search. Wonderful database allowing for users to search for prints by uploading an image of a print or searching for prints alone. Also containes infromation of prints themselves.
Woodblock Prints from the Ukiyo-e Style
MET Museum Article
Chinese
The Artful Fabric of Collecting, Univeristy of Oregon
Introduces viewers to Chinese textiles from the collection of Gertrude Bass Warner (1863-1951), an American who developed the conviction that improved relations between nations can only evolve from the mutual understanding and appreciation of educated minds.
Dunhuang Caves
Dunhuang Grottoes is not only a brilliant art treasure of ancient Chinese civilization, but also an important witness to the dialogue and communication between different civilizations that had taken place on the ancient Silk Road. Guided by cultural relics protection philosophy, this Digital Dunhuang Project is pursuing overall digitization, including collection, processing and storage of the Dunhuang Grottoes and related cultural relics by using advanced science and technology. It integrates all kinds of data including the photos,videos,3D data and other literature data into a digital repository of cave cultural relics which is diversified and intellectual, and can be co-shared globally through Internet.
Online Archive of Modern Chinese Art
Small curated collection of modern Chinese artists.
Visualizing China 1850-1950
The photographs presented here cover over a century of modern China’s history, and a very wide range of places, communities and themes. They represent the work of a 2006-2021 Historical Photographs of China project based in the Department of History at the University of Bristol, that located, digitalized, archived, and published online photographs from the substantial holdings of images of modern China held mostly in private hands outside that country.