Jul 17 - Asian arts at Musee Guimet

Marco and I revisited Paris' Musee Guimet today. Last time we went was almost four years ago during a visit to France. I'm a big admirer of Asian arts, so it's about time I went back.

Musee Guimet houses Paris' Asian arts collection. It's almost the best Asian arts collection that I've ever visited. I say almost because Singapore's Asian Civilisations Museum gives it a serious run for it's money and may even be better. It's a question of taste. Paris' Musee Guimet is more oriented towards "fine arts", meaning sculpture and painting, whereas Singapore's museum gets it's charm it's diverse vernacular objects like clothing, furniture and decorative items like betel nut boxes and tea sets.

The best thing to see at Musee Guimet is also it's worst. The best is the collection of beautiful and elaborate Hindu-Buddhist carvings from the Angkor kingdom, in Cambodia. I don't think any museum in the world has a comparable collection of Angkor sculpture. The carvings are intricate, rich, fine and detailed.

This is also the worst thing in the museum to see, because all these works were hoisted out of Cambodia by the French when it was still their colony. That's why they've got such an amazing museum. In fairness, lots of other antique thieves looted Angkor as well and didn't even open their spoils to the public, just stashed them in the collections of private millionaires. Heck there's probably a guy chipping away there while I type.

The picture below is an example. In front of two major gates in the Angkor temple complex, there are two immensely long seven-headed serpents called nagas, who protect Buddha. You can walk up the road along these serpent's bodies for the length of a football field. But when you get to the end, the heads are gone. Gone where? Here, in Paris.

Marco and I stayed about two hours, until the museum closed about 6pm. Upon leaving we both realized we were REALLY hungry for Asian food, imagine that. So we killed some time at the Bombadier Pub near the Pantheon till the reasonable Parisian dinner hour of 8, then went and ate a delicious Korean barbecue near the Place de la Contrescarpe.





Here are a couple other items from the museum:

Two closeups from a very lively Japanese screen



































Chinese horse statues; elegant with simple, clean lines