Image: Asian Art Museum of San Francisco
The Asian Art Museum of San Francisco is presenting ‘Al-An deSouza: Table Settings,’ an installation that brings the museum’s permanent collection into dialogue with the artist’s photographs of streets and an extensive watercolor project made over several months at a living-room table. The installation is on view from April 9 through November 2, 2026, in the museum’s South Asian Galleries.
The work develops from deSouza’s sustained attention to overlooked details in the built environment. Their street photographs focus on “cracks and stains, signage and markings, bumps and dips, and potential slips and trips,” according to the museum’s exhibition text. That practice of looking downward and moving carefully through public space becomes a point of connection with objects and images encountered in the museum’s galleries.
Each session of the watercolor project began with a pot of tea at the artist’s living-room table. The remnants of that tea were used to form the ground of the day’s painting, making the domestic ritual part of the work’s material process. Across the installation, elements associated with the rarefied atmosphere of museum collections are placed alongside humble, accidental or everyday traces.
DeSouza has described the project as a meditation on how value and beauty are assigned, both inside galleries and beyond them. Their choice of watercolor is central to that inquiry. The artist cites the medium’s associations with the amateur “Sunday” painter and with femininity, as well as its relatively low carbon footprint and its reliance on controlled staining. DeSouza also connects watercolor’s perceived devaluation to broader questions about what is socially valued and what is treated as a stain on culture or the social body.
Born in 1958, deSouza works across photography, text, performance and pedagogy. Their 2018 book ‘How Art Can Be Thought’ argues for art as a vital university-level research discipline, while their most recent book, ‘Ark of Martyrs,’ is described by the museum as a polyphonic “replacement” of Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’ Their writing has appeared in publications including Third Text, The Brooklyn Rail and Art Journal. Their artworks have been shown at institutions and exhibitions including the Phillips Collection, Krannert Art Museum, the Johnson Museum, the Pompidou Centre, the Gwangju Biennale and the Guangzhou Triennale.
The Asian Art Museum, also known as the Chong-Moon Lee Center for Asian Art and Culture, is located at 200 Larkin Street in San Francisco. ‘Table Settings’ is included within the museum’s program of exhibitions and installations and remains on view through November 2, 2026.
