24 ASIAN ART: CULTURAL AND GLOBAL CONNECTIONS conveyed a strong sense of the collective experience shared across East Asia as ancient societies transformed into modern nation-states. The artworks, ranging widely in media and culture, were mostly drawn from SCMA’s collection, with a few loans from other Five College museums. The exhibition thereby evolved around, and brought visibility to, a significant section of the museum’s hold- ings, which corresponds to the college’s global and multidisciplinary curriculum. During the period under examination (19th–21st centuries), Asia became increasingly en- meshed in the worldwide circulation of objects and ideas. Therefore, a key objective for the exhibition was to look at Asia not as an isolated and static continent but rather in a global context, as a place with flexible boundaries, a source of artistic inspiration and a site of artistic production. In addition to artists from Asia, the exhibition featured a significant number of European and American artists who traveled to and lived in Asia such as Felice Beato, Lilian May Miller and Beat Streuli, as well as Asian-born artists reclaiming their heritages overseas such as Ushio Shinohara, Nam June Paik and Hung Liu. Some of the historical events that the exhibi- tion touched upon, including the Canton trade and the Korean War, were essentially part of American history as much as they were about Asia. In an effort to make connections throughout the museum’s physical space and across geographies and time periods, we put up related installations in other galleries during the run of the exhibition: The Body: Works on Paper from the Permanent Collection in Nixon Gallery, Huang Yan: Chinese Shan-Shui Tattoo and This Could be Us, You, or Anybody Else: Modern and Contemporary South and Southeast Asian Art at Smith n the Carol T. Christ Asian Art Gallery, and Cinematic Re/Play: Videos by Zhang Peili and Bodies on Screen: Videos from the SCMA Collection in the Video & New Media Gallery. Works that have been on long- term display in collection galleries, such as Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux’s Bust of a Chinese Man, were also highlighted in relationship to the theme of the Body exhibition. The exhibition’s accompanying programs were designed to encourage visitors to think of Asia in the present tense, rather than a timeless past; enhance awareness of recent East Asian history in relation to the United States, as well as the complex relationships among countries represented in the exhibition through a focus on social and political events; and deepen appreciation and understanding of the art by including multiple perspectives. One interpretive strategy was the creation of a timeline on the introductory exhibition wall with key events relating to the objects presented. A digital Asia-centered map, created by education intern Tara Sacerdote ’18 with support from staff in the Spatial Analysis Lab and the Imaging Center, was projected onto the floor at the exhibition entrance to situate visitors geographically. The exhibition design focused on navigation through chronology and themes and sections were delineated by color-coded graphic ele- ments on introductory panels and object labels. Ideas generated by Museums Concentrators and Student Museum Educators contributed to the creation of a “Visitor Insight” station, which posed the question “Which work of art took you by surprise? Share why.” Visitor responses were posted on the wall for public viewing and reflection. Curatorial student assistant Julia Xu ’19 contributed to the design of the station. Maia Erslev ’18 assisted the curator with conceptualizing the first grouping of objects in the exhibition, for which she developed a prototype interpretive project using aug- ABOVE: A Student Museum Educator (SME) leading a school group tour in 体 Modern Images of the Body from East Asia