session extending into early evening as part of "Art Night on 

 the Mall" was a huge success. 



Film programs this year included works by the "Beijing 

 Underground," the next generation of young filmmakers to 

 follow the celebrated "Fifth Generation" to the Beijing Film 

 Academy; other films from China; and series featuring recent 

 productions from Iran, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Viet- 

 nam, Japan, and Pakistan. 



Special programs during Art Night — Korean dance and 

 Indonesian music and dance — were held on the Freer steps, 

 enhanced by splendid sunsets and summer breezes. 



Marking the opening of the Sackler exhibition "The 

 Buddha's Art of Healing" were five Tibetan Buddhist monks 

 from the Drepung Loseling Monastery in southern India. 

 During the first nine days of the exhibition, they created a 

 five-foot mandala, or diagram of the universe, in colored sand. 

 The process could be observed by a visit to the Sackler Gallery 

 or from afar on washingtonpost.com, which featured daily up- 

 dates on the process. The monks' efforts attracted 23,286 fas- 

 cinated visitors to the Sackler. People arrived in a continuous 

 flow, watching as the mandala emerged, first in a pattern of 

 white chalk lines and then an increasingly colorful diagram as 

 they filled in the lines with fine, colored sand. After the man- 

 dala was complete, tradition called for its destruction and 

 deposit into a body of water, so that the sand could carry its 

 healing powers all over the world. Consequently, on the ninth 

 day, the monks performed a closing ceremony, then swept the 

 finished design into a container, and led a phalanx of visitors 

 to the nearby Tidal Basin, where, chanting, they poured the 

 sand into the water. 



The highlight and finale of the Galleries' full schedule of 

 lectures and book events this year was the visit by acclaimed 

 writer Jan Morris, who spoke on "Imperial Everest," drawing 

 comparisons between British attempts to climb the world's 

 highest mountain and British imperialism in Asia. Morris had 

 been special correspondent for the London Times and broke 

 the story of Sir Edmund Hillary's successful conquest of 

 Everest in 1953. 



Among the ten concerts scheduled this year in the popular 

 Bill and Mary Meyer Concert Series were three concerts by- 

 Musicians from Marlboro and performances by the Shanghai 

 Quartet; Cho-Liang Lin, violin, Hai-Ye Ni, cello, and Li Jian, 

 piano; Mitsuko Shirai, soprano, accompanied by Hartmut 

 H6U, piano; and the Brentano String Quartet, winner of the 

 Cleveland Quartet prize. 



As the season finale, the Takacs Quartet devoted two even- 

 ings to the six string quartets of composer Bela Bartok (1881- 

 1945). Included in the program noces was an essay, "Bartok, 

 the Chinese Composer," by Bright Sheng, who explains how 

 his own music is influenced by his encounters with folk music 

 in rural China during the Cultural Revolution, and by his 

 later interest in Bartok, who incorporated Hungarian folk 

 traditions into his work. 



Presentations of Asian music regularly filled the Meyer 

 Auditorium and sounded from the Freer steps in concerts by 



such acclaimed artists as virruoso Wu Man, pipa (Chinese 

 lute), and Joseph Fung, guitar; actor Iraj Anvar and vocalist 

 Reza Derakshani presenting an evening of Persian poetry and 

 music; Asad Ali Khan, the last surviving master of the "rudra 

 vina" (bin), and Mohan Shyam Sharma, "pakawaj" (drum); 

 Sanjay Mishra, guitar, and friends; Ilyas Malayev and En- 

 semble Maqam, performing music and dance from Central 

 Asia; Karma Gyaltsen of the Tibetan pop band Chaksam-Pa 

 playing Tibetan traditional songs; the Gamelan Mitra 

 Kusuma Ensemble, a full Balinese gamelan; the Gundecha 

 Brothers performing Hindustani vocal music; South Indian 

 dancer Swati Bhise and vocalist Savithri Ramanand and her 

 ensemble interpreting the twelfth-century love poem "Gita 

 Govinda"; and Reiko Kimura, koto. Kimura is a longtime 

 member of rhe Japanese new music ensemble, Pro Musica 

 Nipponia. 



Research 



The Galleries' research mandate has been enhanced significantly 

 this year by gifts that have allowed us to initiate important 

 research projects and publications. The Andrew W. Mellon 

 Foundation gave $600,000 to support a four-year study, 

 "Materials and Structures of East Asian Paintings," that is 

 allowing researchers in the Department of Conservation and 

 Scientific Research to address long-standing problems in the 

 history and survival of works of an based on scientific 

 knowledge of their components. Designed and directed by 

 Dr. John Winter, the Galleries' senior conservation scientist, 

 the project uses laboratory methods to examine the materials 

 used in Asian paintings, how they are made, and how they 

 deteriorate under various conditions. 



In addition to a gift of funds to purchase an outstanding 

 group of Chinese paintings and calligraphy in honor of the 

 Freer 's 75th anniversary (see Acquisitions), grants from the 

 E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation made possible 

 the initiation of two important research and publication 

 projects on Chinese art: A catalogue of the Freer and Sackler 

 jade collections by Jenny F. So, curator of ancient Chinese an; 

 and a catalogue of the Song- (960-1279) and Yuan- (1279- 

 1368) dynasty paintings in the Freer Gallery by Joseph Chang, 

 associate curator of Chinese art. 



The Galleries initiated a series of Occasional Papers reviv- 

 ing a Freer tradition. The first of the new papers, Dara-Shikoh 

 shooting Nilgais: Hurt: and Landscape in Mughal Painting, by 

 Ebba Koch of the University of Vienna, focuses on an impor- 

 tant Mughal hunt scene in the Sackler Gallery collection. A 

 second Occasional Paper, The Jesuits and the Grand Mogul: 

 Renaissance Art at the Imperial Court of India (1580-1610) by 

 Gauvin Alexander Bailey of Clark University accompanied an 

 exhibition of the same title. As guest curator. Dr. Bailey ex- 

 amined the exchange of visual imagery that occurred as a 

 result of Jesuit missions to India. 



Two imposing monographic studies — Sultan Ibrahim Mir- 

 zaos Haft Awrang, A Princely Manuscript from Sixteenth-Century 

 Iran (1997), by Marianna Shreve Simpson with contributions 



54 



