Asian Rice Art and Culture in Display

Rice has been cultivated in Asia for over 7,000 years. (Piper, 1993:1) That rice means to the Asian peoples more than being their staple food is not an overstatement. That the growing and eating of rice have been intimately bound to aspects of regional identity has been proved true. In 2003, UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History published a huge volume of The Art of Rice: Spirit and Sustenance in Asia, an impressive outcome of the project directed by Roy W. Hamilton, the Curator of Asian and Pacific Collections of the Museum. This publication records numerous art forms and cultural aspects of rice in Asia prevalent in the time when the project was carried on, together with some flashbacks. Turning each page of the book, one becomes amazed to learn how Asian peoples have been profoundly yet unconsciously bound together by means of rice as therein depicted. Hamilton himself notes in his preface that rice is the one thing that comes closest to uniting at least a large part of what people know as Asia. (Hamilton, 2003: 11