Southeast Asia

Watch Javanese artisans make batik and learn more about their refined techniques.

Objective: Students gain an appreciation and understanding of art and culture, and build language skills by reading; developing scripts; making choices about gesture, voice, and expression; and performing traditional stories alongside art objects in the Asian Art Museum’s collection galleries.

Duration: One class period over the course of 1 week

Only in the past sixty years has “Southeast Asia” been used to refer to the region comprising modern-day Burma (Myanmar), Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Brunei, and the Philippines. Learn more.

Valerie Luu and Katie Kwan of Rice Paper Scissors bring Vietnamese street food to California. For this Tasting Menu, they explore how food and fashion are passed down through generations — namely by our grandparents. Joining them is Andria Lo of local blog Chinatown Pretty, which celebrates the street style of seniors in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

ERINA ALEJO is an educator, organizer and artist. Through ethnographic and archival frameworks, Alejo examines the role of the city, family and body in intergenerational memory, healing and trauma. Click to watch their Artist Spotlight 

Audio tour for The demon Maricha tries to Dissuade Ravana, approx. 1780

For more than a thousand years Indonesians have used wayang theater as a method of addressing the conundrums of life. The lively puppet traditions of South and Southeast Asia have portrayed epic stories that shrank the cosmos down to a miniature world. The vast expanse of the earth could symbolically be reduced to the few feet of a puppet stage. The puppeteer’s lamp became the sun, throwing light on myriad creatures who, in their nobility or baseness, make up the world.