Productive people, be warned.
"Asian Games: The Art of Contest," which will open Saturday on the Mall at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, is insidiously subversive. It comes with an agenda. To shrink your dedication to gainful occupation is its not-so-hidden purpose. It is baited with enticements, and these have been deployed to lure you into realms of escapism, addiction, senseless competition and plain old time-wasting.
This dangerous display comes with silver-inlaid dice and painted playing cards, some circular, and gold-embellished go boards, and polo sticks and shuttlecocks, and chess sets carved so cunningly that you can see the jewel on the top of the turban of the king.
This go board, with gold ornamentation, dates from Japan's Edo period.
(Kozu Kobunka Kaikan Museum)
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"Asian Games" was organized by the Asia Society, in New York. It is seductive. The curators -- Colin Mackenzie, Irving Finkel and a team of many colleagues -- have deployed all the tricks of the art historian's trade (scholarship, surprise and large lashings of beauty) to divert you from your duty.
They ask you to recall long-lost afternoons of Parcheesi and Monopoly. The oldest image known of people playing backgammon (embossed on an 8th-century bowl of silver gilt) is among the show's temptations. The winner yells in triumph, his arm raised in the air.
Here's a game of toko -- part basketball, part darts -- in which the player must toss his feathered missiles into a bronze jar. There are Persian playing cards (from an eight-suit deck of 96). What is all this for?
Think of all the hours, the mostly mindless hours, lost, forever lost, to dominoes and dice, solitaire on Windows and poker on the tube. Where did all this come from? The show provides an answer. Chess, go, polo, backgammon, volleyball, Monopoly, Snakes and Ladders, playing cards and dice -- their details, of course, have shifted through the centuries, but all of these diversions have come to us from Asia, the homeland of the game.
The show is in four chapters: "Tossing and Turning: Games of Chance," "War and Territory: Games of Strategy," "From Cards to Connoisseurship: Games of Memory and Matching," and last, and somehow least, "Power and Dexterity: Games of Physical Skill."
The oldest die we know, so far, was buried in a Syrian tomb 7,000 years ago. What's odd is that it's modern: its pips, on opposite faces, add up to seven, just as they do today.
The act of divination -- of questioning the gods, the fates, or Lady Luck, by tossing bones or markers -- is older still.
The Sackler's show has many dice. They're made of ivory and lacquered wood, of silver, ivory and bone. They come in various shapes. One especially worth noting -- an 18-sided number -- is a piece of Chinese bronze inlaid with turquoise, rock crystal and gold. It's 2,000 years old.
And it's something of a mystery. Such dice were thrown in playing a board game known as bo, which -- for about 500 years -- was all the rage in China. Bo is often mentioned in antique Chinese texts. Bo boards are often found in antique Chinese tombs. Scholars think it must have been partially a race game (like Monopoly) and partially a displacement game, in which one tries to "eat" the pieces of one's opponent, but they're not sure. What has failed to survive is knowledge of its rules.
Peasants may have played it -- using seeds or pebbles -- but you won't meet peasants here. Peasants do not leave behind pieces of carved jade or boards inset with silver. These gamesters were rich. Most were showoffs, too. Their stuff shimmers. Americans comparing the plastic bin of plastic toys in the corner of the kid's room with a kemari set on view are bound to feel discouraged. Kemari was an air-ball game. Using only their right feet, the eight players tried to keep an inflated deer-hide ball in the air as long as possible. One ball on view looks gold-leafed; another's sheathed in silk. The box in which these are stored shows a bouquet of chrysanthemums done in lacquer work and gold.
The rich have time to waste. That may be one reason for getting to be rich. They especially like winning. That may be another. Remembered in these objects are aristocrats of many kinds, kings, emperors and shahs.
The rich, because they're rich, also get to be extravagant. Akbar, for example, the ruler of the Moguls, a dignitary rich enough to each year take his weight in gold, thought small game pieces beneath him. When Akbar played pachisi 400 years ago (that's the game we call Parcheesi), the tokens he preferred were lithe and living women. His huge game board survives.
Pachisi is a race game with dice. There are many such games in the show. The winner in Monopoly ends up with all the money. That's because Monopoly is ours. In a race game from Tibet, the goal is, well, more spiritual: The winner attains nirvana. A promotion game from 17th-century China has the player climb the long ladder of officialdom until, at last, he reaches the top of the bureaucracy. Though these aspirations differ, the throwing of the dice and the counting of the moves is pretty much the same.
Some will argue that games are beneficial. They encourage social groupings, disperse social tensions and enhance mental skill. Chess improves the warrior's strategy, his foresight, his willingness to sacrifice (but, oddly -- have you noticed? -- only goes so far: The winning monarch never gets to kill the other king). Go is in its own way equally instructive. But these board games are exceptions. Most involve a lot of luck.
What Asian games do best is absorb hours. This may have made them more important in days before television, radio, magazines and movies soaked up our free time.
Some do so with much wit. Especially intriguing is a Japanese example, an incense-matching game, sort of like concentration, in which the players have to match not playing cards but smells.
Such games may be enticing. They are also nice to look at. They tease you with pleasure. They provide their small surprises. They promise you much fun.
So does "Asian Games."
Asian Games: The Art of Contest will remain on view through May 15 at the Smithsonian Institution's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. For information call 202-633-4880 or visit www.asia.si.edu. Admission is free.
