ANCIENT ARTS: Remarkable Asian Treasures At The Art Gallery Of Greater Victoria Span Four Millennia

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The windowless storage space in the basement of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria – home to some of the country’s finest treasures of historical Asian art – is a place where time moves slowly. But not Barry Till, the Asian collection’s longtime curator. When he leads a rare tour of his sanctum, he becomes a perpetual motion machine, opening cabinets and pulling out drawers, flipping the lids off boxes and peeling back protective wrapping, pausing only to launch into a story, drop some poignant observation or rattle off a string of dates. 

A trip down this rabbit hole, with its warren of interlocking rooms, becomes a strange time-warping, geography-defying whirlwind that traverses national borders, ancient empires and four millennia of art history. Within Canada, the collection, with its 10,000-odd pieces, is second in size and quality only to the Asian holdings at the much larger Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. It’s a remarkable cache in an unlikely place – a modest, mid-sized city that lacks the large Asian diaspora of Metro Vancouver. 

Going behind the scenes in museums and galleries is always fascinating, especially for those with pack-rat tendencies and historical interests. Even small collections are worth many millions of dollars; a misstep could easily prove disastrous. But a firsthand encounter away from the public display cases is one of the best ways to get a sense of a collection’s true breadth as well as an intimate look at its most precious pieces, objects that may have borne silent witness to war and famine, family rivalries and bloody plots, elaborate affairs of state and illicit romance. 

The imagination revels at one of the collection’s prized pieces, Peacocks and Pine Tree, a six-fold screen from Nijo Castle in Kyoto. Painted on gold leaf by Sanraku Kano, who lived from 1559 to 1635, it was sold to the celebrated American architect Frank Lloyd Wright in the early 1900s. Eventually, it found its way to Vancouver art dealer Uno Langmann, who donated it to the gallery. The screen was in poor condition, Till says, but was restored by the National Research Institute for Cultural Properties in Tokyo, in exchange for the right to exhibit it for six months. “If it could talk,” Till says, “it would have all kinds of stories.”

It’s unfair to describe the gallery’s basement as cluttered, for works are, of course, duly labeled and shelved. Till has no trouble putting his hands on, say, bronze belt buckles from China that date as far back as the 16th century BC, or specific Japanese prints from a collection he continues to build with judicious online purchases. Still, it’s hard to escape a sense of excess and porous boundaries. In one room, a trolley cart filled with recent donations, all covered in bubble wrap, awaits inspection. It’s part of the steady stream of gifts that has seen the Asian collection swell during Till’s 35-year tenure. The collection now accounts for about half the gallery’s total holdings. 

Nearby, pieces from a recent exhibition, Treasures of the Chinese Scholar’s Studio, sit out on a table, ready to be reshelved. An inkstone catches Till’s eye. He picks it up and quickly demonstrates how it was used to hold ink. Then, like an eager schoolboy, he shows off a couple of crickets – models, not live specimens – and points to a cricket cage, an exquisite barred box carved from ivory. With a quick aside about the Chinese pastime of cricket fighting – the insects battle not to the death, but until an antenna is knocked off – Till launches into another story, this one about a rice granary official during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644 AD) who traded his best horse for a prize cricket. Alas, the man’s wife became curious and opened the lid of its pot for a peek. The cricket jumped out and was promptly eaten by a cockerel. The woman, aghast, killed herself. When her husband returned home and saw what had happened, he too took his own life.

The story done, Till is on the move again. He pushes a red dolly laden with stonework out of the way with one foot so he can open the door to an adjoining room with more cabinets. From there, he makes a quick turn into the repository for large artifacts. Here, a samurai’s armour – one of seven suits in the collection – competes for space with a limestone Buddha head. Where is it from? I’ve long since stopped keeping track. My notebook is filled with scrawls abandoned mid-stroke, because Till has just pulled open another drawer and is midway into a story that seems even more tantalizing than the last.

“It just goes on and on and on,” he repeats again and again, as he comes up for air after pulling open the latest cabinet or yet another drawer. Clearly, this is a man who loves his job. Indeed, his fascination with ancient history goes back to his childhood in Saskatchewan. He gravitated to Far Eastern Studies simply because it was offered at the University of Saskatchewan. After earning an undergraduate degree, and then a master’s, he started a doctorate at Oxford. But then he won a scholarship that took him to China, where he studied from 1977 to 1980. It was an interesting time. Mao was not long dead, and in the immediate aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the old shrines Till wanted to explore were mostly off limits. He went anyway, and was detained at times by police. Still, that didn’t stop him from being honoured as a “model student” at the University of Nanjing. China was also where Till met his wife, Paula Swart, the curator of Asian studies at the Vancouver Museum from 1989 to 2008.

The collection’s mainstays are the Chinese and Japanese collections, each with some 4,500 works. The Japanese collection, billed as possibly the best in Canada, includes Buddhist sculptures and numerous paintings and prints, as well as ceramics, lacquerware and a relatively new donation of textiles that includes the wardrobe of a famous geisha, Ichimaru. Her kimonos have been shown internationally, including a 2006 stop at the National Geographic Museum in Washington. The gallery’s Asian garden boasts a Japanese shrine, the only authentic Shinto shrine in North America. The wooden structure, which dates from 1900, is decorated with a pair of lion-dog heads and a baku, a mythical animal that feeds on people’s nightmares. 

There’s more: the gallery’s Tibetan art includes a painting from the 1600s that shows the Mongol ruler Kublai Khan and his Tibetan teacher, Phakspa. The Korean collection, largely from a former private museum in Busan, contains paintings, ceramics and folk crafts. Other highlights are miniature paintings from India and Persia, and Buddhist sculptures from Southeast Asia.

The gallery, which opened in 1951, has become a popular repository for private collections from Vancouver and Toronto – often amassed by missionaries or wealthy traders years ago when Asian art was cheaper than it is now, says Till. One of the most important gifts came from an American. Isabel Pollard, the wife of a San Francisco silk importer, donated nearly 1,000 items, mostly from Japan, putting the collection on a solid footing. She was encouraged by Colin Graham, the gallery’s first director, who started the collection in the early 1950s, thinking it would help the gallery distinguish itself. Till, who expects to retire in a year or so once his replacement is hired, is only the second curator of Asian art. The first, Joan Stanley-Baker, served for about four years in the late 1970s.

Collectors donate to the gallery in part because it rotates shows regularly rather than keeping the best pieces as a permanent exhibition, meaning their collections are more likely to be seen by the public, says Till. He also organizes periodic shows of new donations. The gallery’s current exhibition, which runs to April 3, features 150 such pieces – about a fifth of the gifts received over the last four years. 

A highlight is a 15-foot-long Chinese scroll from the 1800s. “It was never meant to be seen by a living being,” Till says, as he begins another story. The painted scroll documents a funeral procession that includes hired performers in elaborate robes, with the widow’s white cortege, the colour of mourning, bringing up the rear. Lavish funerals were de rigueur, even at the risk of bankrupting the family, to appease the spirit of the deceased. It was feared that any skimping might cause the spirit to get restless and bring bad luck to the living. As Till tells it, the family kept the scroll to show the spirit should it make any rumblings.

It’s easy to find parallels between the funerary scroll and the larger Asian collection. Like the scroll, the collection spends most of its time unseen by human eyes. But in this analogy it’s we, the living, who need to remember what has come before. The exhibitions Till culls from these storage rooms illuminate not only rich cultural traditions, but the cycles of human history, reminding us that the ebbs and flows of the past are like restless spirits, and prone to recur.

Art Gallery of Greater Victoria

1040 Moss Street, Victoria, British Columbia V8V 4P1

250-384-4171

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