How brilliant it is for an applied art museum to have a part of your permanent collection revamped by a contemporary artist?
No dusty windows and gloomy neon lighting here, we’re at the MAK, in Vienna, and the scenography of the Asia collection has just been revamped by the Japanese Tadashi Kawamata (can’t seem to stop talking about Japan here!).
The display is halfway between a fragile scaffolding and opened wooden crates piled up to the roof. It looks as if the antiques had just been shipped from every corner of Asia and we were peeking through the barely opened boxes, discovering one treasure after the other, like in some kind of fantastic storage room. The details for every piece are handwritten on the glass and on the walls (in both latin and asiatic alphabets), adding to game of transparencies and the graphic power of the display.
My fellow ceramics fan, you have to see that!
_____________ Find out more about Tadashi Kawamata here. I’ll write more about the MAK soon, but in the meantime you can check their website, or even better, go ther and experience first-hand the “extraordinary union of applied art, design, contemporary art and architecture.”
