NEW DELHI — With an instrument perplexing to most westerners, Ravi Shankar helped connect the world through music. The sitar virtuoso hobnobbed with the Beatles, became a hippie musical icon, and spearheaded the first rock benefit concert as he introduced traditional Indian ragas to western audiences over a nearly century-long career.

Painter and printmaker Wang Gongyi and painter Farooq Hassan, portrayed in the same episode of Oregon Art Beat, have not only obvious differences, but also unexpected commonalities. While each artist is fascinating in his or her own right, comparing and contrasting the two adds depth to the discovery.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services tells us not only that depression is the second leading cause of death among Asian American and Pacific Islander women between 15 and 24 years old, but also that in this age group, Asian Pacific American (APA) women have the highest rate of suicide. These are grim statistics for a stage of youth that

Merging science, history, and storytelling, a new exhibit at the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry (OMSI) brings to the forefront ideas and everyday experiences of race and racism in the United States.

A child rides a bicycle in the sun, while not too far away, a young girl skips rope. A grandmother, sitting in a wheelchair, visits with friends. A boy no older than five years old walks along in a cowboy getup. One woman offers a plate of food to another. A blonde girl and a Japanese girl — classmates and friends — smile together.

The ordinary, human scenes of childhood play, neighbors, and friends are unsettled only by the pervading presence of barbed wire and black squares. The depictions are featured in a series of paintings by renowned artist Roger Shimomura, whose select works from an exhibit and book, Shadows of Minidoka, are on display at the Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center (ONLC) through October 7.

An old friend of Mikyoung Kim’s caught up with her recently and remembered visits to the artist’s home when she was a girl, growing up in a creative household where her mother was a ceramicist and her father an architect.

"We would listen to Mikyoung play the piano," the friend reminisced, "then eat dinner her mother cooked on plates her mother made, in a house her father built."

If you are reading these words between 10:00am and 5:30pm Monday through Saturday or noon and 5:00pm Sunday, you might want to stop, get yourself down to Gallery 903 in northwest Portland immediately, and finish this article later.

Quebec-based Cirque du Soleil returned to Portland last month with OVO, a circus extravaganza featuring a magical world of acrobatic fleas, juggling ants, and other wonders of the insect world. The show, held at the Portland Expo Center for the first time, continues through Sunday, May 20.

OVO features an international cast of 55 daredevils, musicians, and other performers

Photographs by University of Oregon alumnus and acclaimed photographer Russel Wong are currently on view in "The Big Picture," an exhibit on display through August 19 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) in Eugene, Oregon. The exhibit, Wong’s first at his alma mater, features more than 30 images from the artist’s wide swath of photographic subjects, which include track stars, celebrities, landscapes, and images for film.

What images do the words "opera singer" call to your mind? A loud, flashy, self-absorbed entertainer? A giant woman with a helmet and a spear? A cartoon character everyone is trying to convince to shut up? That’s what baritone André Chiang, who did not spend his childhood dreaming of becoming an opera singer, used to think. "I was not the biggest opera fan when I was young," the Portland Opera studio artist admits.

Materialism," the name of the exhibit by Filipina-American painter and printmaker Erin Galvez showing at Portland Community College’s Cascade Campus Gallery, is the first clue that the artist is both having fun with and thinking carefully about her work. After seeing the show, I wanted to learn more about how her luscious abstractions relate to the common definitions of materialism, so I asked.

"The show is called ‘Materialism,’" she explained, "because the materials that one uses in creating definitely inform the work. Because of the materials’ inherent qualities, they may lead to a different, albeit subtle, aestheticism in the finished piece."

Cirque du Soleil’s latest production — Michael Jackson: The Immortal — delighted fans in Portland, Eugene, and Seattle this month. The worldwide tour, which began in Montreal October 2, is travelling across North America over the next nine months. Shows in December are scheduled in Las Vegas and Phoenix; the tour then heads to Boise and several venues in California during the month of January.

After three visits to "The Artist’s Touch, The Craftsman’s Hand: Three Centuries of Japanese Prints from the Portland Art Museum," I am ready to declare that this is the most exciting exhibit I have seen at the Portland Art Museum (PAM), and the competition has been stiff indeed. Moreover, three visits will not be enough for me, and may not be enough for you. If you have been thinking of becoming a member of the museum, entitling you to visit whenever you like, for as long as you like, now is a great time.

"The Artist’s Touch, The Craftsman’s Hand" is organized into 10 thematic sections —

The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience isn’t the easiest place to find, but if you persevere in your search for 719 South King Street in Seattle’s Chinatown-International District — and park for free under I-5 a couple of blocks away — you’ll be rewarded not only with an extraordinary museum, but also with a tour of a historic hotel that will leave you feeling as if you’ve been time-travelling as you climb back down the stairs to the street. But wait! There’s still one more treat in store.

The museum is named for an immigrant who came from China to Seattle in 1930 at six years of age, made peace with a gradeschool bully by drawing comic strips in which the bully was a superhero, served in the Army, earned a law degree, and became a Seattle city councilman — the first Asian American to hold elected office in the Pacific Northwest. Wing

The Chambers@916 gallery in downtown Portland is currently hosting "Connecting …," a group show that explores "the many facets of connection." Korea-born artists Sang-ah Choi and Jiseon Lee Isbara were among nine creatives invited by curator and director Martha Morgan to take over the space with their interpretation of the theme.

The Seattle Asian Art Museum is beautiful not only on the inside, but also on the outside, in its dramatic setting in Volunteer Park, where an Isamu Noguchi sculpture draws your eye to the city below. As you arrive at the museum, savor the natural world outside and note the magnificent doors that lead from that natural world to the world of art. Take your time.

Portland’s introduction to the Oregon Ballet Theatre’s (OBT) 2011/2012 company — four new members of which had just arrived from their native China — was like something out of a dream.

On a late afternoon this summer in tiny Director Park, beneath a tent protecting the dancers and a few lucky members of the audience from threatening and occasionally spitting rain,

A woman balancing on one hand, rope-skipping taken to the edge with pyramids of skippers, aerial ballet with a hoop, acrobatic feats with bamboo poles festooned with glimmering fabric, extreme juggling, trampoline work that seems to turn the world sideways, acrobats diving through hoops like thread flying through needles, and a Dralion dance that blends traditional Chinese dragon and lion dances and carries them both to dizzying new heights: This is some of what you’ll see at Cirque du Soleil’s Dralion. The catch is that by the time you read this, Dralion will have moved on to British Columbia. Will you follow?

If you saw Dralion here in Portland in 2002, you didn’t see this one. While the Asian-inspired theme of harmony between nature and humans hasn’t changed, everything else

The new Portland will be very different from the old-school Portland," said Colored Pencils Art and Culture Council co-founder Ronault L.S. Catalani, known to most Portlanders as Polo, as he welcomed visitors to the opening of "Colors of Portland," an art exhibit that kicked off July 1 at the Multnomah Arts Center. "We will integrate newcomers immediately. Their spiritual, cultural, and social resources can’t be squandered."

If you are a newcomer to Colored Pencils, regardless of your race or ethnicity, your age, your faith, your gender orientation, your ability or disability, and whether you are homeless, rent, or own a home, Polo continued, you are welcome.

Brazilian choro ("lament" in Portuguese) music has been experiencing a renaissance, and it’s not just Latin-American musicians leading the movement. Portland group Alma Brasileira is an example of foreign musicians who were drawn to the complex beauty of the choro style.

Anyone who has ever had a mainland Chinese mother or host mother will understand the appeal of Hsueh Wei’s latest series of art, "Transparent or Not: A Visual Art & Cross-Cultural Study of Contemporary Urban China." In a set of photographs, blown up larger than life, she makes visible a fashion trend that is at once alarming and endearing: silk stockings and fancy shoes

More than 80 different Peace Corps volunteers from the Pacific Northwest contributed their stories, pictures, and collected objects to the Oregon Historical Society’s (OHS) current exhibit, Peace Corps: 50 Years of Service and Bringing the World Home. Launched in 1961 by U.S. President John F. Kennedy, the goal of the Peace Corps is to channel the energy and intelligence of America’s young adults to aid foreign countries.