The popularity of Asian contemporary art has grown significantly since the 1990s, presenting a challenge when attempting to shape any type of survey. First Look: Collecting Contemporary at the Asian addresses and resolves this situation masterfully.

The arts scene in the South Bay Area can often seem muted compared to the considerably more cosmopolitan atmosphere of San Francisco. But to ignore the up-and-coming art scene emerging down the peninsula would be a mistake.

Contemporary art has always been a moving target, oftentimes reveling in the clever, the ingenious, and the unanticipated. All of which can make contemporary art extremely vibrant and, at times, pleasantly challenging.

Over the years, Alcatraz has served as home to many things, including a federal penitentiary. So it seems entirely fitting for “The Rock” to now be hosting a major exhibition by one of China’s most celebrated activist artists with @Large: Ai Weiwei on Alcatraz.

In the early 1980s, New York City was dirty, dangerous, and just a few years out from the brink of bankruptcy. But to the thousands of creative souls drawn to Gotham, the city offered an exciting escape from an even-more malfunctioning world, together with the opportunity to discover and define new types of art and ideals.

When you hear the word yoga, your thoughts might turn to scenes of Indian yogis engaged in mystical rites. Or you might think of the purely exotic, conjuring images of near-naked ascetics covered in ash and saffron. Most likely, however, your mind will probably fill with images of spandex-clad exercisers casting themselves in a series of seemingly unnatural postures (asanas). Such is the challenge with a topic such as yoga.

Long associated with the New York City art scene of the late 1950s and early 1960s, Jasper Johns has also traditionally drawn substantial interest here in the San Francisco Bay Area, his work featured in several notable public and private collections.

In 1977, at the age of twenty three, Cindy Sherman began work on a series of 8 x 10” black and white photographs in which the young, aspiring art student recorded herself acting out a sweep of female roles and types. During the course of the next three years, Sherman would produce a total of seventy of these images, which ultimately became known as the Untitled Film Stills.

Samurai have long held an iconic position in Japan, as have the various depictions of this pre-industrial military nobility. From stoic swordsman in attentive service to the aristocracy to post-modern and futuristic robotic warrior, the samurai has established itself as a paragon of duty, honor, and service.

In the early years of the twentieth century, as the royal courts of Europe were basking in the final glow of a fading brilliance and the Gilded Age of the New World was propelling an entirely new set of stars into the firmament, one institution was to play a role unlike any other in this historic transition.

With so much focus today on the digital image, it’s refreshing to discover an artist whose principal form centers on novel, idiosyncratic, and often idiomatic approaches to photography and printmaking.

Victor Vasarely and the Amish might initially seem like an incongruent pairing, never mind Paul Klee, Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers, or Mark Rothko. But it’s hard not to find amazing commonality between these vanguards of modernist, abstract painting and the intricate quilts created by a group we often stereotype as either plain-living or perhaps simply just plain.