LA County Museum of Art
South and Southeast Asian Art Collection

Los Angeles' LA County Museum of Art is world-ranked with over 100,000 works from around the globe. It is the city's most popular museum and houses one of the largest collections of art in the U.S.

Claude Monet's "Water Lilies" is here and there is a specially designed pavilion for Japanese art, as well as galleries for South Asian and Himalayan art (noted below). There are treasures upon treasures inside this premier and "visitor-friendly" art museum.

South Asian Sculpture Galleries
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art's collection of South Asian sculpture is one of the most encyclopedic outside of South Asia. The earliest material on exhibit is from the Harappan civilization of the Indus River Valley, which flourished approximately five thousand years ago. The display of Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain sculptures in a variety of media documents the entire spectrum of the stylistic and iconographic development of the art of these religions throughout South Asia.

Southeast Asian Art Gallery
This gallery displays art from Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam. Bronze and Iron Age objects from the Dongson culture of Indonesia and Vietnam and the Ban Chiang culture of Thailand are on view along with Buddhist and Hindu sculpture from all periods and regions. The collection of Sri Lankan art is one of the largest and most comprehensive outside Asia.

Himalayan Art Gallery
This gallery is devoted to the art of the Himalayan countries of Nepal, Tibet, and Bhutan. The collection includes many illustrated manuscript pages and sculptures in various media ranging in time from the eleventh through the twentieth century. The collection is especially notable for its early Tibetan and Nepalese thanka paintings.

South Asian Painting and Decorative Art Gallery
This gallery displays a diverse range of South Asian painting on a rotating basis, including eleventh-century Pala dynasty manuscripts, sixteenth–nineteenth-century Mughal dynasty paintings, and modern South Asian graphic arts. The decorative art collection includes early writing cabinets, Christian ivory carvings from Goa, fine metalware, jewelry and enamel work, and many important Mughal jades and glassware. Two outstanding works are an exquisite Mughal brass ewer and the personal dagger of the seventeenth-century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.