A Pair of Chinese Wardrobes

You ever walk into one of those rooms in a museum, one of the ones far from the entrance of the wing, almost a Random Walk accident of arrival — with your toes tired, your knees achy, coming off a bit of drudgery in the rooms preceding — and all of a sudden the ceiling opens above you and the room expands like a reverse Hitchcock-Vertigo-Jaws-Beach Dolly zoom and those subconscious plans to head kinda in the direction of the where you think the exit is that were forming in the back of your head immediately dissipate and your knees unlock and you feel compelled to stop walking, roll your head around on your shoulders a bit and exhale slowly?

This might just do that to you. Many things of beauty here, most of them surpassed by the room itself: there are extra tall panes of glass lining the lengths of the room, gratuitously covering a few simple handscrolls and a bit more than a dozen scattered images on paper. But most likely, your eyes will skip past them and head straight for the center of the room’s gravity, and indeed its true geographical center, which revolves around two matching Ming Dynasty dressers constructed of a rich red wood (no further information provided) inlaid with mother of pearl, amber glass and ivory in the pattern of winter-bare flowering trees populated by a few scattered songbirds. The wardrobes themselves are enormous: certainly more than ten feet tall and hinged with impeccably etched silver (I think) latches and hinges.

The imagination runs amok.

Like Henry Miller, once my favorite and perhaps still the bravest of American writers, China has long stood in for an archetypal idea of ancient, insurmountably distant opulence, grandeur, tradition and beauty. The risk of exoticizing is ever-present for the curious Westerner, but with the state of multipolar geopolitical rivalry in the world today, I think the downside risk of understating China’s historical brilliance is as acute as the risk of overstepping into exoticization. Here is Miller in 1977’s Mother, China and the World Beyond:

“Even as a boy the name China evoked strange sensations in me. It spelled everything that was vast, marvelous, magical, and incomprehensible. To say China was to stand things upside down.”

Can the purpose of an Asian Wing inside an American Museum be anything but to make one stand in awe of Asia? Are ...