Summary
An offbeat and engrossing show at the Middlebury College Museum examines this Asian legacy of pre-electronic at-home entertainment. It's an exhibit rich in historical exegesis, with wall panels explicating the ancient origins of games still widely played today. But this is no pedantic walkabout that requires more reading than admiring. Many of the boards and game pieces on display are downright dazzling in their artistry.
Although the Middlebury version of "Asian Games: The Art of Contest" is smaller than the show presented earlier in Manhattan and Washington by the New York-based Asia Society, it's still wide-ranging in its geographic and chronological purview. Vermonters can thank Colin Mackenzie, the Middlebury College Museum's curator of Asian art, for assembling the show and arranging this stop. Along with the recent exhibit of Palestinian art at the Wood Gallery in Montpelier, "Asian Games" demonstrates that Vermont now occupies a place on the world-art map.Luxury materials were used in crafting some of the games. An 18th-century set of Parcheesi pieces from India, for instance, is made partly of gold and inlaid with rubies, sapphires and emeralds in a hearts-and-flowers pattern. Other items are as plain as can be. The thousand-year-old playing pieces from a game known in China as weiqi and in Japan as go are bits of earthenware resembling tiny pink pills.See the full content of this document
Extract
Play Times; Art Review; 'Asian Games'
Asia is the source of many mainstays of world civilization -- gunpowder, paper and the compass, for example. Turns out that board games belong on the list as well.
An offbeat and engrossing show at the Middlebury College Museum examines this Asian legacy of pre-electronic at-home entertainment. It's an ...See the full content of this document
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