Asia Society Museum

Asia Society Museum, American museum in New York, N.Y., established in 1978 with a gift from the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller III, founder of the Asia Society (1956). The museum displays fine art and artifacts of Asian origin in order to forward the organization’s larger mission of furthering American-Asian relations.

The permanent collection, based on Rockefeller’s gift, includes priceless artifacts and masterpieces that range in date from 2000 bce to the 19th century. Particularly well-represented are Chinese ceramics from the Song and Ming dynasties, Chola dynasty bronzes, and sculptures of Southeast Asia. The collection contains a number of Indo-Chinese spiritual treasures, including Buddhas from China, Tibet, and India. The museum’s core collection is cataloged according to region and grouped under the headings of South Asia, Southeast Asia, China and Mongolia, Himalaya, Korea, and Japan. These regions account for a large area of Asia, from Afghanistan in the west to the Pacific rim in the east. While acknowledging the vast cultural and artistic diversity in these areas, the museum emphasizes their shared histories and commonalities.

In the 1990s the Asia Society Museum became one of America’s first art institutions to found a program for the exhibition of contemporary Asian art, and in 2007 it established a permanent collection of contemporary Asian and Asian American art.