FWF project - Life of the Skušek collection
On September 8, 1920, Ivan Skušek Jr. and his wife Tsuneko Kondo Kawase, together with her two children, arrived at Ljubljana.
Ivan Skušek had served as a commissioner to the sea in the Austro-Hungarian navy and had been on board of the vessel Kaiserin Elisabeth on a mission to China when World War 1 broke out. The Kaiserin Elisabeth sunk in the battle of Tsingtao at the beginning of the war as the Japanese army attacked the German colony. The Austro-Hungarians were either taken to Japan as POWs or were practically stranded on in China. In 1917, when China officially declared war to the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the Austro-Hungarian detachment was imprisoned and they were officially released only in 1920. A few months later, the Skušeks embarked on a ship in Shanghai for a passage to Marseille – leaving China for a post-WW1 Slovenia which was unfamiliar not only to the Japanese woman. A month later several dozens of boxes filled with all kinds of Chinese art objects followed via a different route. The circumstances under which Ivan Skušek could acquire such a mass of Chinese art are not yet completely clear. Most of the pieces were from the Qing Dynasty of the Manchu emperors, the last dynasty of China. At the time of acquisition (ca. 1915-1920) the majority of the objects were not yet antiquities in the classical sense as they had been produced during the final phase of the Qing period just a few decades earlier. Still a few pieces, especially the religious objects such as several metal works depicting Buddhist Tantric deities, are datable to the early Qing Dynasty.
As Ivan Skušek’s idea of establishing a museum for Asian art in Ljubljana never became a reality, the selected pieces from the collection – furniture, porcelain, textiles, pipes, and even the sculptures – became part of their everyday life as the couple decorated and embellished their flat with the various items. The collection continued through all their living spaces, as they occupied three different flats over the decades to come. After Tsuneko’s death in 1963, the collection was moved to the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum (SEM).
In March 2023, a bilateral project application was approved by ARIS (SI) and FWF (AUT) to reconstruct the history of the collection and digitise the objects in the context of the Skušek’s lived-in museum. Most of the pieces were located in the storage room of the museum. Some objects even had been in boxes since the packing in China.
On May 29, 2024, the exhibition Asia in the Heart of Ljubljana: Life of the Skušek Collection curated by members of the bilateral project was opened at the SEM. The exhibition shows a broad selection of the collected objects. While the display of objects is of course fundamental to an exhibition in general, the focus in the present show is not so much on the single pieces. Instead, the exhibition focuses on the recreation of the atmosphere of the former lived-in museum. The contextualisation of the collection with their owners – or perhaps the actors on the stage, which was created by the arrangement of pieces – is the over-arching idea of the curators.
But even the open design of the exhibition does not allow what had been a key aspect when the collection had been assembled as a true lived-in museum at the times of the Skušeks: direct interaction or even close-up inspection of the objects. While such distance between visitor and artefact is of minor importance in the case of large-scale pieces of furniture, it clearly creates quite some dissatisfaction when it comes to smaller items such as the metalworks. In the exhibition, the set of Buddhist sculptures is arranged in a segregated space as it had been documented on several archival photographs. Thereby, the overall visual impact of the setting is recreated, but the distance between the single metalworks and the visitor is enlarged – and the details escape the visitor‘s eye.
To make the artistic quality and iconographic details perceivable, the largest piece of the group, a depiction of Vajrabhairava in embrace with Vajravetālī, was re-created and visualized in augmented reality (AR). On a tablet the visitors can virtually navigate themselves closely to the sculpture and view the many details for the 34-armed deity and his female partner.segregated space as it had been documented on several archival photographs. Thereby, the overall visual impact of the setting is recreated, but the distance between the single metalworks and the visitor is enlarged – and the details escape the visitor‘s eye.
To make the artistic quality and iconographic details perceivable, the largest piece of the group, a depiction of a wrathful tantric Buddhist deity and his partner in embrace (Vajrabhairava and Vajravetālī), was re-created and visualized in augmented reality (AR). On a tablet the visitors can virtually navigate themselves closely to the sculpture and view the many details for the 34-armed deity and his female partner.
For more details on the technical aspects of the exhibition, please >> CLICK HERE <<