BERLIN.- The Museum of Asian Art at the Humboldt Forum has opened Mirae kh Rhee: Weiterreichen / Hand-Me-Down, a special exhibition that brings together new and recent works by the interdisciplinary, research-based artist Mirae kh Rhee. On view through February 16, 2027, the exhibition reflects on the histories of collecting, the politics of representation, and the complicated meanings of preserving and passing objects, images, and knowledge from one generation to another.

Rhee, who works between Germany, California, and South Korea, approaches museum collections not as fixed archives, but as places where power, memory, exclusion, and identity continue to be negotiated. Her work asks direct but layered questions: Who collected, and why? What kinds of objects were preserved? What stories were told through them? And perhaps most importantly, whose knowledge, labor, and lives were left outside the frame?

Starting from her own diasporic identity, Rhee examines collecting practices and their entanglements with forced migration, cultural appropriation, and inherited systems of value. Her practice combines research, personal narrative, and visual reinterpretation, using art to open up histories that museum displays often leave silent.

At the center of the exhibition is a newly created folding screen, placed in dialogue with a historic screen from the museum’s collection. The older work presents objects of scholarship and auspicious symbols associated with the values and personal tastes of Korean Confucian scholars during the late Joseon period, between the 18th and 20th centuries. Rhee’s response breaks with the tradition of these images, known as chaekgeori or munbangdo, reimagining the language of learned objects from a contemporary and feminist perspective.

In works such as The Artist and Her Books and These Aren’t Books…, Rhee plays with ideas of knowledge, authority, and artistic self-presentation. By staging her own collection, shaped through a feminist lens, she challenges the patriarchal Confucian inheritance that historically claimed authority over culture, education, and representation.

The exhibition also considers the history of “Wunderkammern,” or cabinets of curiosities, which existed in both East Asia and Europe. These collections of precious, rare, unusual, or strange objects often served as displays of power and tools for constructing identity. In Wunderkammerkŏri, Rhee questions these older conventions of collecting and shows how their legacy continues to shape museum collections today. The work invites viewers to reconsider who has traditionally had the right to collect, classify, and interpret the world.





A further thread in the exhibition addresses the misunderstandings, exoticisms, and romantic fantasies that have shaped cultural exchange between Europe and Asia for centuries. These distortions also influenced the formation and character of museum collections. In Patterns of Illegibility, Rhee works with historical drawings from a Meissen pattern book, appropriating and reworking visual material tied to racist clichés and European ideas of Asia.

The exhibition then moves toward contemporary realities with The Guardians, a series of drawings that use irony to criticize practices of “yellowfacing” and “whitewashing.” Through these works, Rhee connects historical representation with present-day conversations about race, visibility, and the ways cultural identities are flattened, performed, or erased.

Mirae kh Rhee: Weiterreichen / Hand-Me-Down is presented by the Museum of Asian Art at the Humboldt Forum as part of “The Collaborative Museum,” a project of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art of the National Museums in Berlin. The initiative focuses on transcultural cooperation and seeks new, multiperspectival approaches to researching collections. It also explores new forms of collaboration with international museum and academic communities, as well as with representatives of societies of origin.

The exhibition was curated by Uta Rahman Steinert in collaboration with Mirae kh Rhee. An accompanying booklet will be made available as a PDF on the exhibition website.

Mirae kh Rhee: Weiterreichen / Hand-Me-Down is on view at the Humboldt Forum, Schloßplatz, Berlin, in Rooms 318 and 319 on the third floor. The museum is open Wednesday through Monday from 10:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m.; Tuesday is the regular closing day.