Presentation 3

The East Asian Gallery at MKG
as a Venue of Transcultural Negotiation
Ms. Wibke Schrape
Head of East Asian Department, Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg, Germany

ProfileWibke Schrape is Head of the East Asian Department at the Museum fürKunst und Gewerbe Hamburg. She worked as assistant curator at the Museum
für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin (2015–17) and functioned as assistant professor for Japanese art at the Institute of Art History, Freie Universität Berlin(2008–12). In 2018, she completed her dissertation on Ikeda Koson (1803–68)
and the Order of Images: Artistic and Art Historical Constructions of Rinpa at FU
Berlin. Wibke Schrape is co-editor of Inky Bytes: Traces of Ink in the Digital Era(2018) and Elegant Gathering in a Scholar’s Garden: Studies in East Asian Art in
Honor of Jeong-hee Lee-Kalisch (2015).

The Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (MKG) understands its East Asiangalleries as a venue of transcultural negotiation. It serves as a space of encounter with historic as well as contemporary East Asian art for local and international audiences. Transculturality rejects the notion of closed and homogeneous cultures. Cultures underlie a
constant process of negotiation and translation in contact with other cultures. Transcultural approaches therefore stress shared interests and common values across nationalborders. The result is not a single global culture, but a plurality of social groups that
constantly negotiate their individual cultural identity. Transcultural research towards a
global art history goes hand in hand with postcolonial studies and similar developments
in historiography such as “histoire croisée”. However, looking at art in a global context
often has a tendency to emphasize -Isms of any kind. It is therefore important to reachbeyond mere visual associations or histories of influence and cope with the complexityof cultural identity in regard to a specific subject within a clearly defined space and timeframe.
In the special exhibition Mobile Worlds or the Museum of our Transcultural Present(April to October 2018), curators Roger M. Buergel (Johann Jacobs Museum, Zurich)and Sophia Prinz (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt Oder) questioned the Eurocentric order of Western museums. Rather than classify objects according to epochs,
geographies, art and non-art, they focused on the global movement of objects, people,and ideas. For this exhibition, I teamed up with the twelve-year old thing researcher LeifRaeder (Erich-Kästner-Schule, Hamburg Framsen) to prepare a display of tsuba. The
MKG’s collection of sword fittings consists of approximately 2,000 tsuba and about 500
other objects of sword fittings. First, Leif Raeder selected more than 100 tsuba at thestorage that we digitalized together. Then he organized these tsuba according to categories of his own choice. Finally, 80 tsuba at Mobile Worlds were displayed in the following categories: Openwork, Black, Glossy, Spiders, Colorful, Very Old, Samurai, Special
Material, Gold. These categories do not fit into one system. Some refer to techniques,others to material, visual appearance or iconography and “very old” to an historical organization. But surprisingly, these diverse categories helped people without knowledge oftsuba to understand this fascinating art. Of course working with school children is nota solution to avoid Orientalism. In contrast, working with untrained local audiences
34International Symposium: The Arts of Japan in a Global Context: Beyond Orientalism and Occidentalism

The East Asian Gallery at MKG as a Venue of Transcultural Negotiation

国際シンポジウム

35International Symposium

might seem like a danger to deepen biases. But in fact it is not. It is our task as curatorsand specialists to provide the knowledge necessary to overcome Orientalism and Eurocentrism while keeping the collection approachable.
For the special exhibition Inky Bytes: Traces of Ink in the Digital Era (09/2018–01/2019), the MKG invited contemporary artists to work with the historic collection.
Inky Bytes was not a survey exhibition on current Chinese ink art, but reflected theartistic networks between artists active in Hamburg and artistic centers of China. Theexhibition even stretched into the city when Zhang Xiaofeng, Wu Qiong and Li Jie
from Hangzhou and artists based in Hamburg joined forces to make stone rubbingsof Hamburg’s sites of historic value. Participating locals and visitors were able to get a
new impression of their hometown with the help of a more than 1.500 year old Chinese
reproduction technique. When people entered the East Asian Gallery, they first met
something familiar such as rubbings of Hamburg’s flood marks next to rubbings fromthe West Lake scenery. Inky Bytes literally picked up visitors at their own doorstep andintroduced them to East Asian art.
The upcoming exhibition Pure Luxury: East Asian Lacquer (February to May 2019)
conveys to visitors, why and how objects from Japan ended up at a museum of arts andcrafts in Hamburg. One section introduces the artworks in their acquisition context orin relation to their previous owners. With regard to displaying Japanese art in a global
context, some sections will include historic and modern examples of European lacquer
as well as modern Japanese design from the MKG collection. These dialogue partners
show how Japanese lacquer influences European design and vice versa. The exhibition
Among Friends: Japanese Tea Ceramics (June 2019 to February 2020) will highlight therelationship between the MKG’s founding director Justus Brinckmann (1843–1915)
and the art trader S. Bing (1838–1905) as two key figures in the promotion of Japanese
art around 1900. Both exhibitions are part of a two-year project (funded by the ZEITStiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius) to research the collection history in order to analyze
international networks of trading, collecting, and promoting Japanese art between 1873
and 1915. This glimpse backwards enables the MKG to move forward. The potter Jan
Kollwitz (*1960) and the novelist Christoph Peters (*1966) are invited to co-curate theexhibition and revise the collection in a contemporary dialogue of friends.
All these examples of displaying Japanese or Chinese art in a global context nourish
relations and multiply points of contact. As curators we should provide technical andpractical knowledge to preserve, handle, research, and display art. But most of all, weshould provide access to art. There is not one story behind one object, but many different possibilities to approach an object. We need to encourage people from local children
to international scientists to approach Japanese art in exhibitions, storages and online
collections. The more people engage with an object and the more stories an object isallowed to tell, the more agency it can unfold and act in a truly global context.