THE TITLE of this month's issue may give offence. Since Edward Said, the word 'Oriental' can scarcely be used without apology; and it may be considered characteristic of the Magazine's routine neglect of non-western art that India, China, Iran and Japan should be bundled uncer- emoniously inside an orientalist cover. 

But many events are taking place this year to remind the western world of non-western art. The Australian National Gallery in Canberra re-installed its Asiatic col- lections in April; the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore has opened a new Museum of Asian Art; the Musee Guimet in Paris has inaugurated a new annex to house Japanese and Chinese Buddhist sculptures; the Cleveland Museum of Art, whose recent Asian acquisitions we publish this month (p.417), will be holding one of the most important exhibitions of Japanese art to be held outside Japan in Autumn this year. Major shows of Indonesian art are now on view in New York and Washington (see Calendar) and will be reviewed next month.

On the more modest scale proper to Britain's current cultural aspirations, museums in the U.K. are representing their non-western collections (and a Japanese festival begins in September). After the wave of Japanese and Indian galleries in 1989-90, it is the turn of China. The new T.T. Tsui gallery of Chinese art opens at the Victoria and Albert Museum this month, and the Oriental Gallery at the British Museum next year. As always, it is instructive to compare the genesis and funding of initiatives in Britain with those overseas. While the Pantheon Buddhique in Paris is jointly financed by the French Ministry of Culture and the Japanese Government, the V. & A.'s Chinese gallery is named after a Hong Kong collector who, on his first visit to South Kensington in 1978, found the Chinese ceramics gallery closed, but was shown round after a telephone call to the curators. Chance in this case was a fine thing, but the anecdote - like all foundation myths - can be variously interpreted. Different approaches to presenting oriental artefacts in these new galleries reveal differing attempts to build con- ceptual bridges across the cultural divide. The Walters has arrayed its collections, largely unseen for over a century, in a restored Baltimore mansion opposite the Art Gallery, recreating on the lower floors the atmosphere of a nine- teenth-century collector's domestic surroundings. In the Tsui Gallery which, we are told 'represents a radical new step in gallery design', the V. & A. has eschewed 'an art- historical approach' in favour of arranging the objects thematically - under categories such as 'living', eating and drinking', 'ruling', collecting' and 'burial'. Both ap- proaches may have their dangers: the V. & A.'s that of telescoping 5000 years of history into a synchronic show- case; the Walters's that of reducing objects of rich anthro- pological significance to the ornaments of a connoisseur's  mantelpiece.

There is no doubt, however, that oriental art is more familiar to the educated public in the United States than it is in Britain. Many American universities teach courses in Chinese, Japanese, Islamic, South-east Asian and Middle and South American art to undergraduates who will not necessarily major in art history. In most - though not all - British universities, the History of Art is a specialist and unregenerately western subject. But the historical roots of this stunted growth are shallow. The Courtauld Institute taught Islamic art for the first twenty-five years of its existence, and had a Professorship in Chinese Art from its foundation in 1932 until the separate establishment of the Percival David Foundation in 1951. After that, western and non-western art went their separate ways in London University. The study of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian and African art is now centred at the School of Oriental and African Studies, whose Department of Art and Archaeology has a teaching strength of over a dozen members of staff. Structured co-operation with other London colleges means that undergraduates studying western art at University College can now take non-western courses at SOAS, an opportunity long available at the Sainsbury Centre at Norwich, or, in the field of Latin American Studies, at Essex.

It would be idle to pretend that there are no obstacles to a non-specialist study of oriental art. The r6le of texts in Chinese and Japanese painting is so dominant that a non-linguist may be doomed to incomprehension. The structures of patronage at the court of Siileyman the Magnificent may defeat the student of the Medici. While Roger Fry could write in 1925 'Chinese art is in reality extremely accessible to the European sensibility, if one approaches it in the same mood of attentive passivity which we cultivate before an Italian masterpiece . . . or a Gothic or Romanesque sculpture', the present day inves- tigator of material culture may well feel that passivity, however attentive, is not enough. Moreover Fry's aesthet- icism was resistant to Indian art, and he was described by a later Editor of this Magazine as having 'barred our way across the Himalayas'. Nonetheless bridges of multifarious shapes and structure may be constructed across the abyss. Roderick Whitfield's review of the Bada Shanren exhibition on p.405 (who could imagine such a show taking place in Britain? Some- what more predictably, we shall have Hokusai at the Royal Academy this winter) presents us with a Chinese artist of seemingly recognisable individuality: his discon- tents are echoed in the complaints of Shreve Simpson's Safavid artist about his salary (p.376). Those who have studied western pilgrimage, the influence of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or St Peter's will be fascinated by John Guy's replicas of the Mahibodhi temple (p.356). Craig Clunas's elegant account of Ming attitudes to conspicuous consumption (p.368) draws specific parallels with con- temporary western sumptuary laws. If these articles* give us the welcome impression of insight into other minds and other cultures, Lynne Cooke reminds us (p.385) that stereo- types of'otherness' may be doubly misleading when applied to Japanese artists at work today in the global village.