Chinese Textiles Meet Japanese Metalwork In A Rather Unexpected New Exhibition

By Jessica Ye (Jessica Yap)

What happens when silk meets metal? It sounds like an unlikely pairing, but that is precisely what the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art is about to explore with Woven and Cast: Chinese Textiles and Japanese Metalwork from the Shirley Z. Johnson Collection.

Opening in Washington, D.C. on 7 November 2026, the exhibition brings together Chinese textiles from the Ming and Qing dynasties with Japanese metalwork from the 20th and 21st centuries. They come from different periods, different materials and different artistic traditions, yet placed beside each other, they reveal something rather unexpected: a shared fascination with texture, light and radiance.

Shirley Z. Johnson, who died in 2021, had an obvious eye for luminous things. A lawyer, philanthropist and longtime museum trustee, she built her collection around Chinese textiles and contemporary Japanese metalwork, drawn to intricate craftsmanship and materials that could catch and reflect light. Her collection is now at the centre of the exhibition, and the museum is not trying to make the two traditions look more alike than they are. Instead, the works are displayed side by side so that their similarities begin to emerge naturally.

Silk threads, some wrapped with peacock feather filaments and others combined with metal, appear alongside gold, silver, copper and other alloys. The textiles were woven and embroidered, while the metalworks were cast and hammered into forms that can be delicate or boldly sculptural. Different materials and different techniques, certainly, but both can produce surfaces that glow, shimmer and catch the eye. It is a rather simple connection, but one that becomes much more interesting when you are standing in front of the actual objects.

The Chinese textiles also reveal just how much meaning could be carried by what someone wore. Symbols indicated court rank and the status of the wearer, while imagery drawn from animals, birds and natural landscapes communicated wishes for prosperity and longevity. The Japanese metalwork looks to nature too, connecting the physical world with ideas of harmony and artistic expression. Water is one of the more interesting recurring themes, appearing across both Chinese and Japanese art and providing another small reminder that artistic ideas rarely stay neatly within one culture or period.

The exhibition also gives visitors a chance to see what happens before these beautifully finished objects reach the gallery. A two-part video installation looks at the techniques behind them, with textile conservators explaining the making and preservation of the woven and embroidered works, while contemporary Japanese metal artists Ōsumi Yukie and Tanaka Terukazu demonstrate casting, hammering and other processes used to shape metal. There is something particularly satisfying about being shown the amount of knowledge and labour hidden inside a piece that, at first glance, simply looks beautiful.

For me, however, the more fascinating part of Woven and Cast is the woman whose eye brought these objects together. Johnson was not simply someone who accumulated beautiful things. She became a pioneering collector of contemporary Japanese metalwork at a time when the field was still developing international recognition, eventually donating more than 60 works by contemporary Japanese metal artists to the National Museum of Asian Art. She also gave the museum a significant collection of Ming- and Qing-dynasty Chinese textiles, as well as her archives on collecting, and was a published author on Chinese textiles and Japanese metal art.

That makes the exhibition feel considerably more personal. Johnson’s interests were not limited to the surface beauty of the objects. She was interested in craftsmanship, history and the ways artists working in different traditions could find their own ways to create something luminous. The exhibition takes that curiosity and makes it visible, putting embroidered silk beside hammered metal and centuries-old Chinese textiles beside works created by Japanese artists in our own time.

The result is an exhibition built around a rather unexpected conversation. A metallic strip can be woven like fabric, while a textile threaded with metal can catch the light like gold. A Chinese textile and a Japanese metal sculpture may have very little in common at first glance, yet once they are placed together, the similarities become difficult to ignore.

And that is probably the reason I would make time for this one if I were in Washington, D.C.

Woven and Cast: Chinese Textiles and Japanese Metalwork from the Shirley Z. Johnson Collection opens 7 November 2026 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art and runs through 28 November 2027. The exhibition is in Gallery 22 of the East Building. The museum is at 1050 Independence Ave. SW, Washington, D.C., and admission is free, with no tickets required. It is open daily from 10am to 5:30pm, except December 25.