Here's one of my favorite puzzles in all of Asian art. For hundreds of years, Japanese artists painted tigers. And almost none of them had ever seen one.

There are no tigers in Japan. There never were. And for more than two centuries the country was closed to the outside world, so the tiger arrived the only way it could: as a story. Painters worked from old Chinese pictures, from imported skins, from travelers' descriptions, and from pure imagination. And because imagination was most of what they had, something wonderful happened. The tigers came out human. Look closely at an antique Japanese tiger and you'll find expressions no real tiger ever wore. Curiosity. Mischief. Indignation. A kind of grandfatherly grumpiness. They weren't painting an animal. They were painting a legend, and they poured themselves into it.

I've been collecting them for years. Fifty or sixty small tigers, and dozens of antique wall pieces, each one somebody's best guess at a creature they'd never met. I love every one of them.

Now come south with me, to Java, where the tiger was no legend at all. It lived in the forests and in everybody's stories. And there, ordinary men, farmers and villagers, would sit on their front porches in the evening with a block of wood and a small knife and carve themselves a tiger. Not for a customer. Not for a market. For the joy of making an animal. Most of these carvings are eighty years old and more, and every one of them has personality to spare. You can feel the guy who made it. You can feel him sitting there in the evening light, grinning at what was coming out of the wood.

That's real folk art. Made by a real person, for himself. And somehow, you can always tell.

I should confess I'm not neutral on this subject. In the Chinese zodiac, I'm a Tiger. When I was five years old, the only thing I wanted for Christmas was a tiger rug, and God bless her, my aunt found me one. Where does a thing like that come from in a five year old? I've stopped asking. Some loves you're simply born with.

I'm not alone, either. When the world gets polled on its favorite animal, the tiger wins. Not the dog. The tiger. There's something in that animal that belongs to all of us, even in places that lost their own tigers long ago. Bali had one once, the smallest tiger on earth. It was gone by the middle of the last century. The carvings remember.

Here's the good news. A container just arrived from Indonesia, and inside it, along with a great deal else, were a dozen of these Javanese folk art tigers. They join the eight or ten already prowling the gallery, with my Japanese tigers up on the walls behind them. I'm told a group of tigers is called a streak. We suddenly have quite a streak going in Solana Beach.

The first of them are going up on the site as they're photographed, in the [Primitive & Folk collection]. But better than any photograph: come meet them. Pick one up. Turn it over. Feel the knife marks, and find the one that makes you smile. That's the one the carver made for you.

David Alan