The Asian Art Museum is inviting visitors to look closer — at the museum’s own galleries, at city streets, and at the humble ground beneath their feet — with Al-An deSouza: Table Settings, an exhibition of luminous watercolors on view through November 2, 2026.
Created over months at the artist’s own living-room table, the series grew out of deSouza’s habit of photographing streets while walking and paying attention to every “crack and stain, signage and marking, bump and dip.” Each painting session began with a pot of tea, and the remnants of that tea became the ground of the day’s painting — layering the rarefied and the humble, the intentional and the unplanned.
The result is a meditation on where we find value and beauty: deSouza describes moving through the world “looking down, watching your step, accepting one’s connection to the baseness of matter.” The choice of watercolor is deliberate — a technique tied to the amateur Sunday painter and the feminine, embraced here for its low carbon footprint and its spirit of controlled staining.
Al-An deSouza (American, b. 1958) works across photography, text, performance and pedagogy, with artworks shown at the Phillips Collection, the Pompidou Centre and the Gwangju Biennale. This installation joins the museum’s collection in a gentle conversation about what we choose to treasure.
The Asian Art Museum is located at 200 Larkin Street and is open Thursday through Monday.
Photo: Asian Art Museum
