As the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery preserve, exhibit, and interpret Asian art in ways that deepen our understanding of Asia, America, and the world. Committed to preserving, exhibiting and interpreting exemplary works of art, the museum address broad questions about culture, identity, and the contemporary world.
The museum holds 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 the museum's 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 exemplary objects as springboards for research.
