DIALOGUE – Collection Presentation
01 May 2026 – 31 December 2026
New space on the 4th FloorVisits and guided tours are possible every Saturday between 12 and 6 pm.
Some affinities cannot be explained – only recognised.
Finland and East Asia are connected by more than distance separates them. A shared silence. A tenderness toward reduction, toward gesture, toward material as a bearer of meaning. The understanding that what is essential is rarely loud. The Miettinen Collection, a Finnish private collection based in Berlin, has carried this disposition from its very beginnings. Its affinity for East Asian art – for Japanese, Korean and Chinese positions – is not a curatorial programme but a conviction. An elective kinship, confirmed again and again across decades and thousands of kilometres.
Following a move and a long period of renovation, the collection opens its newspaces. It was a deliberate decision not to mark this moment with a representative survey, but with artists who are particularly close to the collection – artists who have helped shape its identity. The exhibition is an inauguration in the truest sense: an arrival, not a performance.
At its centre are four positions whose works are engaged in deep dialogue with one another.
Leiko Ikemura was born in Japan and came of age in Europe – in Spain, Switzerland, Germany. For decades she has lived and worked between Cologne and Berlin, taught at the Universität der Künste Berlin and teaches at Joshibi University in Kanagawa. Her work – painting, sculpture, drawing – moves at thresholds that resist naming. Body becoming landscape. An Eastern visual language rubbing against a Western one. Her figures are not portraits. They are states of being. Creatures that transform, dissolve, re-emerge. Ikemura has developed a language that belongs fully to no single origin – and it is precisely this that makes it so immediate.
Lee Ufan – born in Korea in 1936, for decades between Kamakura and Paris – is one of the most influential thinkers in contemporary art. As a co-founder of the Japanese Mono-ha movement, he developed an art of pausing: the single brushstroke, the single stone, the space between things as the true site of occurrence. His works do not pose questions – they open a condition.
Lee Bae carries Ufan’s thinking forward – but in his own direction, with his own breath. Born in Korea in 1956, he has lived in Paris since 1989 and has devoted his practice to charcoal. A material that knows fire, that was once forest, that carries time. In his deep black surfaces there is something unexpected: fullness. The compressed, the survived. Where Ufan interrogates empty space, Lee Bae fills it with the weight of matter.MIETTINEN COLLECTION
Leena Luostarinen (1949-2013) was one of the most significant Finnish painters of her generation. Her colour-intense, symbol-laden works – big cats, sphinxes, lotus blossoms, Balinese shadows – speak of a woman who sought not the foreign in distant cultures, but the familiar. Luostarinen travelled widely, carried what she saw into her paintings and transformed it into something deeply personal. What she found in Asian imagery was not quotation. It was recognition. And she stands in a long tradition of Finnish artists who have recognised in the stillness of the East something they already knew from their own North.
This connection has history. Since the late nineteenth century, Finnish artists found in Japanese aesthetics something profoundly familiar: a love of nature, a suspicion of the superfluous, a reverence for material itself. The snow-covered landscapes of Finnish national romanticism mirror Hokusai’s Fuji; the plain stoneware of the Mingei movement echoes in the ceramics of Finnish modernism. It is a quiet conversation that continues to this day.
This exhibition continues it – in new rooms, with works that have made thiscollection what it is. There are not many artists one keeps truly close. These are among them.