National Museum of Asian Art - Smithsonian, Washington, DC

Established a century ago, the National Museum of Asian Art was the Smithsonian’s first art museum. Committed to preserving, exhibiting, researching, and interpreting art in ways that deepen our collective understanding of Asia and the world, the museum stewards one of North America’s largest and most comprehensive collections of Asian art.

We hold in trust for the American public more than 46,000 objects dating from antiquity to the present from China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East as well as an important collection of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American works from the Aesthetic Movement. New acquisitions are constantly added, and the museum now showcases the richness of premodern Asian arts and the evolving visual cultures of Asia in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Utilizing our world-class library and archives, visitors can explore nearly every region and historic period of Asia and the Islamic world, and scholars will find value in our exemplary objects as springboards for research.