Ancient Web: Asianart.com Kept a 1994 Exhibition Online
Asianart.com began in September 1994 and developed into an online journal joining Asian art scholarship, museum exhibitions, galleries, and a discussion forum.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
Asianart.com was exhibiting paintings online in 1994, at a time when visitors still had to be persuaded that a website could be a place for serious visual scholarship.
Its exhibition archive identifies September 16, 1994 as the beginning of the journal, when it presented Early Tibetan Mandalas from the Rossi Collection in London. The archive retains further exhibitions from 1995, including Mongolian art shown in San Francisco and Chinese textiles exhibited at the Hong Kong Museum of Art.
The journal grew beyond a virtual display case. Its about page describes a forum intended for scholars, museums, connoisseurs, and commercial galleries. It invites exhibition notices, research in progress, articles on discoveries, photographs, and readers' questions about objects. That last invitation is particularly revealing: the editors imagined the Web as a way for people who did not belong to the same institution to exchange expertise.
An exhibition does not have to disappear
The editors explicitly promised to keep older exhibitions and articles online as new ones appeared. The site's long-running updates archive includes references to material from 1995 through 1997 and then later years. The site still publishes current exhibitions and articles, but its oldest work remains part of the structure.
Scholar Ian Alsop is identified as the journal's founder and editor emeritus. A list of his contributions includes research on Nepalese and Tibetan art, including a fifteenth-century Newar artist's folding sketchbook. That blend of object-specific art history and public access was an ambitious fit for mid-1990s online publishing.
The website is not a neutral museum database. It includes commercial gallery participation alongside scholarly material, and individual essays retain their authors' arguments. Claims about any object's origin or attribution should be evaluated on their own evidence.
Still, an archive that preserves its first 1994 exhibition shows unusual continuity. The early Web could be fleeting, but a journal built to retain older pages becomes more valuable each year it does so.
Browse the historic exhibitions and read its editorial mission.
Part of the Ancient Web Collection.
- Categories: Ancient Web
- Tags: #Museums, #ancientweb, #1994, #asianart, #onlinejournals