The Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst is a Cologne museum dedicated to oriental art. Inaugurated in 1913, the museum was founded by the Austrian playwright Adolf Fischer and his wife Frida, passionate about Middle Eastern civilizations. In 1937 the museum was closed by the Nazis. Remained for a long time without an exhibition venue, it was only in the seventies that a new structure was built, allowing the museum to reopen. The new building was designed by the Japanese architect Kunio Maekawa (1905–1986), a pupil of Le Corbusier. With its rigorous and clearly structured cubes and the insertion in the landscape of the Aachener Weiher park, the building is linked to ancient Japanese traditions, but develops a modern design language thanks to the cladding with stoneware tiles cooked in Japan. The museum also includes a typical Japanese garden, where there is also a monumental bronze sculpture by Leiko Ikemura.
As already conceived by Adolf Fischer, the exhibits of the Museum of East Asian Art are not presented as historical-cultural documents in the ethnological or ethnographic sense, but rather as independent works of art illustrating specific contemporary or individual styles. Fischer was of the opinion that European and East Asian art are not all that different. Studies in the field of oriental art history have also demonstrated an ancient presence of the aesthetic tradition in eastern countries: a term and an aesthetic of art were formulated in China long before collections existed in Europe and already in the fourth century art in which the objects were brought together on the basis of their aesthetic / artistic value and not just material or symbolic.
