F I R S TP R E V608NEXTLAST

Asian Art Museum, Civic Center
As befitting a city so connected to the East, San Francisco's Asian Art Museum houses the finest collection of Asian art outside of Asia. The museum features pieces from over 30 different countries and over 6,000 years. The museum's collection is so large that only about 35 per cent of it is displayed at one time. The core of the AAM's collection were 12,000 pieces donated by millionaire Avery Brundage. Another patron, Silicon Valley's Chong-Moon Lee donated $15M to help move the museum in 2003 from Golden Gate Park to its new, 165,000 square-foot, location in the city's Civic Center. The AAM was the first American museum to organize an exhibit with a museum in China when it showed treasures from the Shanghai museum in 1983. Today the museum features exhibits as diverse as traditional Geisha arts to Cambodian Buddhas to a retrospective of Tezuka Osamu, the creator of Astro Boy cartoons.
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