Weekend Stories
I enjoy going exploring on weekends (mostly). Here is a collection of stories and photos I gather along the way. All posts are CC BY-NC-SA licensed unless otherwise stated. Feel free to share, remix, and adapt the content as long as you give appropriate credit and distribute your contributions under the same license.
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The Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt
Natural history museums are more than just collections of curiosities. They are public exhibition spaces built upon fieldwork, taxonomy, collecting, preparation, comparison, classification, and interpretation. The Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt is a prime example of this, showcasing the systematic study of nature through its halls filled with exhibits of animals, fossils, rocks, preserved bodies, reconstructed skeletons, models, and instruments. This post reflects on my visit to the museum last year, with a focus on its history, its role in scientific research, ethical considerations, and my personal impressions of its exhibitions.
Lucy, the early hominin
In October last year, I had some time during a conference stay to visit the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt. I was lucky enough to see the replica of one of the most famous fossils in the world: The skeleton of Lucy, the early hominin. In this post, we explore the meaning and significance of this discovery, and what it tells us about human evolution.
Another visit to the Kolumba Museum
A brief photographic note from another visit to the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, with impressions of its rooms, light conditions, materials, and the calm setting it creates for viewing art.
Living Images: Buddhist rituals in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean art
My visit to the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln in January 2026 also included the special exhibition Living Images. Buddhist rituals in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean art. Unlike many museum presentations that treat Buddhist objects primarily as stylistic or iconographic achievements, this show puts religious practice first. The works appear as objects made to be ‘activated’, handled, addressed, carried, copied, installed on altars, or brought into proximity with bodies. The exhibition’s core claim is simple and strong: much of East Asian Buddhist art is best understood not as representation, but as a component of ritual systems. In this post, I want to highlight some of the exhibition’s key ideas and exemplary objects.
The year of the horse: Exploring the cultural history of the horse in East Asia
In January, my first museum visit of the year led me once again to the Museum for East Asian Art in Cologne, where I have seen the exhibition Celebrating the lunar year of the horse. Galloping through time and space. The exhibition brings together works from China, Tibet, Korea, and Japan to explore the cultural history of the horse in East Asia, coinciding with the Lunar Year of the Horse. Running from December 3, 2025, until January 31, 2027, the exhibition presents a broad temporal and material spectrum, ranging from the 3rd century BCE to the modern period. In this post, I’d like to summarize my impressions and insights from the exhibition.
The Bimaran reliquary: The so-far earliest securely datable anthropomorphic image of the Buddha
The Bimaran reliquary, a small gold casket from eastern Afghanistan, is considered by many scholars to be the earliest securely datable anthropomorphic image of the Buddha. Discovered in the 19th century by Charles Masson, it was found within a stupa deposit in Bimaran, near Jalalabad. The reliquary combines relic veneration with one of the earliest depictions of Siddhartha Gautama in human form, flanked by Brahmā and Śakra (Indra). Its sophisticated iconography suggests that the visual language of the Buddha image was already established by the time it was produced, challenging common narratives about the transition from aniconic to iconic phases in Buddhist art.
Calligraphic aspects in Korean art
In parallel to the larger exhibitions, the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln presented the small special display The Line, dedicated to calligraphic principles in Korean art. Though compact in scale, the exhibition addressed a foundational aspect of Korean visual culture: The role of writing and brushwork as a unifying aesthetic principle across media. Thus, a fitting complement to the main show on Jianfeng Pan Ink Roamings we explored in the previous post.
Jianfeng Pan: An ink wanderer between cultures
In April 2025, I visited the exhibition Ink Roamings. Contemporary works on paper by Jianfeng Pan (2014–2024) at the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln. The exhibition presented around sixty works on paper produced over the past decade by the Chinese ink artist Jianfeng Pan (b. 1973), ranging from monumental hanging scrolls to small album formats and serial works. In this post, I summarize what I have seen and learned from the exhibition.
From line to landscape: Tanaka Ryōhei and the quiet radicalism of etching
I was lucky to visit the exhibition From Line to Landscape at the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln (Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne) in December 2024. The show focused on the work of Tanaka Ryōhei (1933–2019) and offered a rare opportunity to see a comprehensive selection of his etchings spanning more than five decades. In this post, I summarize what I have learned and seen from the exhibition.
Frieda and Adolf Fischer and the origins of the Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne
How did a city like Cologne come to host a major museum of East Asian art? In October 2024, I visited the exhibition Expeditions – travelogues and photographs by the museum founders 1897–1899 at the Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln (Museum of East Asian Art in Cologne). The exhibition reconstructed the journeys of Frieda and Adolf Fischer, the founders of the museum, to Japan and Taiwan at the turn of the 20th century. In this post, I summarize some of the key points from the exhibition and reflect on the historical context of the founding of the museum.