Curator’s Choice Lecture | Vishnu’s Cosmic Ocean

Join us for a Curator’s Choice Lecture on Vishnu’s Cosmic Ocean, the monumental bronze Vishnu on its final stop in San Francisco before returning to Cambodia. The recently restored masterpiece—the largest ancient bronze ever discovered in Cambodia—offers a remarkable window into the relationship between water and power, the ingenuity of Angkor’s engineers, and the ways societies use art to express ideas about creation, kingship, and the natural world.

Dr. Natasha Reichle, Associate Curator of Southeast Asian Art and Pierre Baptiste, Director of Conservation and Collections from Musée Guimet come together for a conversation about the conservation and restoration of Vishnu, offering a behind-the-scenes look at the work that went into preparing the sculpture for this extraordinary journey.

Open to Friend, Patron, and Giving Circle members.

• About Dr. Natasha Reichle

  Dr. Natasha Reichle’s recent exhibitions have examined provenance and the circulation of works of art. These include Moving Objects: Learning from Local and Global Communities, Lost at Sea: Art Recovered from Shipwrecks, Philippine Art: Collecting Art, Collecting Memories, and Weaving Stories. Other exhibitions include the first major U.S. exhibition on the arts of Bali, Bali: Art, Ritual, Performance. She is the author of Violence and Serenity: Late Buddhist Sculpture from Indonesia (University of Hawai’i Press). She holds a B.A. in literature from Yale University and an M.A. and PhD. in the History of Art.

• About Pierre Baptiste

  Pierre Baptiste has been working as curator in charge of Southeast Asian Art since 1996. Trained at the School of Louvre, he is an art historian focusing mainly on the arts of ancient Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand. Responsible for the renovation of the Guimet museum galleries reopened in 2001, he curated exhibitions dealing with different aspects of the arts of Southeast Asia. Teacher at the School of Louvre, he worked for several years in the Faculty of Archaeology of the Royal University of the Fine Arts in Phnom Penh. He is currently acting expert on a Khmer-French cooperation with the National Museum of Cambodia (2024-2028).

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Image: West Mebon Reclining Vishnu (detail), National Museum of Cambodia, Phnom Penh, Cambodia © National Museum of Cambodia, Phnom Penh / photo Thierry Ollivier for the Guimet Museum.