New Delhi-based artist Jagannath Panda lives in the burgeoning city of Gurgaon, which is one of India's major outsourcing hubs and bases of operation for global corporations. His works illustrate the city's tensions, as overdevelopment threatens natural habitats and infrastructures collapse before they are completed. Panda's mix of mythology and realism points to the evolving nature of Indian identity and experience today. His snake sculpture, "The Cult of Survival," is an expression of the danger in becoming addicted to the cycle of production and consumption in a rapidly changing world.

Learn about the Japanese baskets in the Asian Art Museum's collection.

Minkisi (sing. nkisi) contain magical substances (“medicines”) that, depending upon the context, are used for protection or devastation. Carved wood human figures like this one hunt wrongdoers in matters of civil law. He is simultaneously chief, doctor, priest, and judge. The figure is studded with nails and blades, which indicate how often it has been used.

Based on a famous eighth-century poem by the great Chinese poet To Fu, this pair of screens with scenes of the Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup illustrates a group of distinguished people, all of whom are drinking heavily and carousing.

The idea of escaping the chains of convention by living wildly was popular in Japan, where the Taoist tone of this painting would have been admired in a country that valued a personal, intuitive form of religious expression.

The Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup, Japan, Momoyama period, c. 1600; Pair of six-fold screens, ink and pigment on gold

This male and female pair represents the ancestral couple. The figures were likely clothed, and the stems of wood on the top of the heads probably once supported turban-like headdresses. They were preserved and honored in the uppermost region of the house of the lineage founder, where they could be seen or touched only by a privileged few. Periodic offerings and solicitations encouraged benevolent behavior from the ancestral couple, who were capable of inflicting harm.

This painting shows a sweeping view of a verdant valley from Comblat, a small town in the Auvergne, where Signac spent about six weeks in the summer of 1887. Signac described it in a letter as "a fairy-tale valley enclosed between splendid mountains." He painted outdoors, alarming villagers with his startingly modern images.

At the time, Signac was working directly under the influence of George Seurat, the innovator of neo-impressionism, and painting in Seurat’s laborious and exacting pointillist technique.

GlassLab, a film by Deidi von Schaewen, 2012. See this film on view in Making Ideas: Experiments in Design at GlassLab at The Corning Museum of Glass through January 6, 2013. http://www.cmog.org/glasslab GlassLab offers designers unprecedented access to molten glass.

In a deliberate attempt to reach a larger public and market, Monet submitted the traditionally formulated Seine at Lavacourt to the 1880 Salon. It was accepted, but the canvas was poorly hung and never attracted much attention except from writer Emil Zola, the vocal advocate of impressionism, who described it as "an exquisite note of light and open air."

In the same year, Monet submitted another, more audacious scene, which was refused. He would never again offer a painting to the Salon.