Books and Things: The Studiolo of kate-hers RHEE invites us into the long history of the collector and collections from both Asia and Europe. Interrogating presentation and collection practices of the male ruling elite and examining works from collections that extend from the Green Vault in Dresden to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, RHEE fashions her own Wunderkammerkŏri (kŏri is a Korean word for things/shelves/distance).

RHEE’s ongoing interdisciplinary social sculpture rethinks the “cabinet of curiosities” through transnational feminism and decolonizing approaches to imagine and empower through the practice of collecting and displaying objects, while looking critically at the transnational migration of collecting practices between Europe and Asia from the mid-16th century.

The Wunderkammerkŏri holds a unique object collection created by the artist and those who she has invited to participate in an collaboratively derived collected that plays counter to the colonial methods of ethnographic and exoticizing collection practices that still find system-wide reverberations in our collections and museums today.

Call for Participants
Along with the idea of decolonizing the space of collections and exhibition practice, the artist is asking visitors to join her to create a community-curated Wunderkammerkŏri reimagining the structures of who donates, collects, and contextualizes these objects, who cares for and preserves artifacts and why.
– Alexandra Chang, curator