New York: From the minute the 400 guests started streaming through the revolving doors of the Guggenheim Museum on March 15 to celebrate the launch of Asia Week New York, up until the last closing of the 43 gallery exhibitions on March 24, the exuberance and enthusiasm was palpable as hundreds of international collectors, curators, scholars and Asian art aficionados converged in New York to see and purchase an extraordinary array of treasures from every corner of Asia.

The Asian art specialists here from Australia, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland, and the United States reported strong sales to known and new buyers from around the globe, with many works on reserve by museums. To date, the combined sales realized by these galleries together with the highly successful auctions-many with record-breaking prices-at Bonhams, Christie’s, Doyle New York and Sotheby’s, achieved 175 million dollars up from last year’s 170 million dollar total.

According to Conover, seen throughout the week were curators from the Sackler Museum at Harvard, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Princeton University Art Museum, the Yale University Art Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, the Clark Center for Japanese Art & Culture, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, the LA County Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, the Harn Museum of Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Lowe Art Museum at University of Miami, Berkeley Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Kimbell Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Norton Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell, Middlebury College Museum, the Smart Museum of University of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Rubin Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Asian Art, Berlin, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Kyoto National Museum, the Korean National Museum, the British Museum, and the Rietberg Museum in Zurich.

Asia Week New York will be held March 14 through 22, 2014. For more information, visit www.asiaweekny.com. ‘)}