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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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.
Martin Parr (1952–2025)
When I read that Martin Parr had died on December 6, 2025, I was personally affected. Parr, who revolutionized documentary photography with his distinctive style and critical eye, was not a just a figure for me, but someone whose work had accompanied my own way into photography for many years. Long before I had a clear sense of what kind of photographs I wanted to take, his images shaped how I looked at everyday life, at leisure, consumption, and the small, awkward rituals people perform without noticing themselves. His death marked the loss not just of an influential photographer, but of a perspective that had quietly challenged how photography could observe the ordinary. In this post, I’d like to reflect on Parr’s influence on photography and share some personal thoughts about his work.
Gregory Crewdson Retrospective
On the same day I visited From Dawn Till Dusk, I also saw the Gregory Crewdson retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. Initially skeptical of his heavily staged photography, I ended up deeply impressed by how many small narratives unfold within each large-format image and by the extraordinary quality of the prints. In this post, I share a few reflections and photos from the exhibition.
From Dawn Till Dusk: Shadows and light at the Kunstmuseum Bonn
In October 2025, I visited From Dawn Till Dusk. Der Schatten in der Kunst der Gegenwart at the Kunstmuseum Bonn. The exhibition presented shadow as an image-producing element in its own right, ranging from historical references to contemporary installations. I liked the playful and surprising ways shadow was used in the artworks. Here are some photos from the visit.