In a Berlin Bunker, Asian Antiquities Converge with Contemporary Art at the Feuerle Collection

Art col­lec­tor Désiré Feuer­le has spent a life­time dis­solv­ing the bound­aries between ancient and con­tem­po­rary Asian art. Hav­ing trans­formed an old wartime bunker into one of Berlin’s most con­tem­pla­tive muse­ums, he hopes to present his vision of art not as a series of time­lines, but as a dia­logue across cen­turies.

Even after eighty years, Berlin main­tains a unique con­nec­tion with its bunkers. Orig­i­nal­ly built to with­stand bomb­ings, these con­crete struc­tures, both mon­u­men­tal­ly evoca­tive and haunt­ing­ly con­fined, have become unlike­ly havens for art and cul­ture, par­tic­u­lar­ly the city’s renowned rave scene. The dark under­ground, both lit­er­al and sym­bol­ic, has long served as fer­tile ground for musi­cal and cul­tur­al inno­va­tion.

As recent­ly as 2008, this for­mat took a new turn with the open­ing of the Boros Col­lec­tion, housed in the ren­o­vat­ed Reichs­bahn­bunker in Berlin-Mitte, a space that once host­ed raves. Yet the con­cept of using bunkers to house and exhib­it art remains large­ly unex­plored. One of Germany’s fore­most pri­vate col­lec­tors, Désiré Feuer­le, is now bold­ly ven­tur­ing into that ter­ri­to­ry, care­ful­ly chis­el­ing out a path that oth­ers may soon fol­low. But what is it about this muse­um, beyond its strik­ing­ly uncon­ven­tion­al set­ting, that has recent­ly begun to res­onate so deeply with Berlin­ers? And why Berlin of all places?

A Timeless Dialogue

Since open­ing its rein­forced steel doors to the pub­lic in 2016, the Feuer­le Col­lec­tion remains one of the most dar­ing visions for what a muse­um space must look and feel like to the vis­i­tor. It’s a space with not many pieces of art in it at all, and yet vis­i­tors reg­u­lar­ly return, many expe­ri­enc­ing some­thing new with every vis­it.

The muse­um puts Feuer­le’s pierc­ing­ly acute vision of what he finds to be beau­ti­ful on view, in the form of Impe­r­i­al Chi­nese stone and lac­quer fur­ni­ture (from as ear­ly as 200 BC all the way to the 18th cen­tu­ry) and ear­ly Khmer sculp­tures (span­ning the 7th to 13th cen­turies), which are dis­played and con­trast­ed with var­i­ous pieces of con­tem­po­rary art from the West and Asia in the inter­est of cre­at­ing a con­ver­sa­tion between places, time peri­ods, and cul­tures. Feuer­le’s ros­ter includes read­i­ly known names such as the British-Indi­an sculp­tor Anish Kapoor and trans­gres­sive Japan­ese pho­tog­ra­ph­er Nobuyoshi Ara­ki, but also less imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­nized names such as the pho­tog­ra­ph­er Adam Fuss, con­cep­tu­al artist James Lee Byars, sculp­tor Cristi­na Igle­sias, and painter Zeng Fanzhi. 

Art as Atmosphere

Although the works share a sin­gle dis­play hall and strik­ing con­trasts of peri­od and style arise from their jux­ta­po­si­tion, this is far from a care­less mashup of ideas. The museum’s infa­mous­ly metic­u­lous own­er demands an expe­ri­ence that must be felt to be believed. Each piece is spaced with solemn grandeur and illu­mi­nat­ed by care­ful­ly cal­i­brat­ed light­ing, pre­cise­ly adjust­ed in place­ment, tone, and bright­ness for every indi­vid­ual work. This care­ful cura­tion sug­gests that each object tells a pro­found sto­ry through emo­tion alone, with all dis­trac­tions min­i­mized or removed entire­ly.

Accord­ing­ly, the Feuer­le Col­lec­tion offers no infor­ma­tion labels beside the art, and vis­i­tors are encour­aged to silence or leave their devices at the door. Cru­cial­ly, the col­lec­tion itself is a gesamtkunst­werk: a total work of art, an ever-evolv­ing, synes­thet­ic envi­ron­ment meant to be expe­ri­enced intu­itive­ly rather than ana­lyzed, begin­ning with the build­ing itself.

A Meeting of Minds

The col­lec­tion is locat­ed in one of West Berlin’s most well-known arts dis­tricts, Kreuzberg, which was once one of the most impov­er­ished quar­ters of the city pri­or to the fall of the wall. It sits in an unas­sum­ing space between a disheveled pub­lic park, the waters of the Landswehr Canal, and a prop­er­ty devel­op­ment office. As a local, you could eas­i­ly walk by the Feuer­le col­lec­tion sev­er­al times before dis­cov­er­ing it was open to the pub­lic, it’s only mark­er being the sub­tle appli­ca­tion of the muse­um’s name in black and red let­ters on its con­crete facade. Once known to locals as the BASA Bunker, the 6,500 square meter space con­sists of two bunkers cre­at­ed in 1943 and intend­ed to serve as a wartime base of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions for the nation­al rail­way sys­tem, the Deutsche Reichs­bahn, but the war end­ed before it could be put into use.

Save for its occa­sion­al func­tion as an impromp­tu rave venue (this is Berlin, after all), it sat vacant for decades until It was final­ly acquired by Désiré Feuer­le in 2011. Upon see­ing the win­dow­less, under­ground hall, accent­ed with only two rows of thick load-bear­ing columns, a dis­tinct vision for the space came to him, and for near­ly a year he set about search­ing for the right col­lab­o­ra­tor to bring his vision to real­i­ty. That part­ner­ship was reached upon his meet­ing with the renowned archi­tect John Paw­son, known for his appre­ci­a­tion of min­i­mal­ism, raw mate­ri­als, and recon­tex­tu­al­iz­ing his­tor­i­cal spaces.

Paw­son has designed or ren­o­vat­ed every­thing from monas­ter­ies and 13th cen­tu­ry cathe­drals to oper­at­ic set designs and sail­boats, but this would be his first project in Berlin. Accord­ing to Feuer­le, as soon as the two met to dis­cuss the project, a shared under­stand­ing was reached between the two of them in “about five min­utes”.

Embracing Raw Architecture

Over the course of the next five years, Feuer­le, Paw­son, and a team of archi­tec­tur­al firms that includ­ed Petra Petersson­s’s Realar­chitek­tur (most famous for their ren­o­va­tion of the afore­men­tioned Reichs­bahn­bunker which now hous­es the Boros Col­lec­tion), under­took an uncon­ven­tion­al ren­o­va­tion of the bunker.

“I knew from the begin­ning when I vis­it­ed the site and first had that vis­cer­al expe­ri­ence of mass that I want­ed to use as light a hand as pos­si­ble,” Paw­son recalls in his web­site’s jour­nal, “Con­cen­trat­ing all the effort on mak­ing pris­tine sur­faces would nev­er have felt appro­pri­ate here. Instead this has been a slow, con­sid­ered process – a series of sub­tle refine­ments and inter­ven­tions that inten­si­fy the qual­i­ty of the space, so that all the atten­tion focus­es on the art.” On sev­er­al oth­er occa­sions, Paw­son has likened the bunker to the engi­neers’ archi­tec­ture praised by Don­ald Judd, the kind of util­i­tar­i­an work cre­at­ed by engi­neers for civic and indus­try use which nonethe­less takes on a cer­tain unique beau­ty of its own over time.

Darkness by Design

The bunker’s low­er floor was found in a state of total dis­re­pair, with the entire floor hav­ing being flood­ed and cov­ered in leaves, sta­lac­tites hav­ing formed on the ceil­ing, and pitch black dark­ness, as if they were pre­sent­ed with a pure­ly neg­a­tive space, a void from which they were tasked to bring some­thing into exis­tence. In the process of ren­o­va­tion, it was impor­tant to all par­ties that each peri­od of the building’s his­to­ry, no mat­ter how slight, was pre­served in some mea­sure, account­ing for each detail and idio­syn­crasy almost as if they, too, were indi­vid­ual pieces in a muse­um’s inven­to­ry.

The changes were slight: white walls were intro­duced on the ground floor, the con­crete was cleaned, cracks were sealed, but many inter­ven­tions of nature were nonethe­less pre­served. The stain­ing from water seep­age and sta­lac­tites were kept in their places. Signs of human pres­ence, too, were sus­tained: a sol­id stripe of green paint from the era when this was a gov­ern­ment insti­tu­tion, graf­fi­ti and fire marks from long-for­got­ten raves, and even a group of long chains, left hang­ing for no spe­cif­ic pur­pose. The lack of any nat­ur­al light com­ing into the build­ing meant that dark­ness would be worked into its favor, trans­form­ing the space from one of wartime defen­sive­ness or rene­gade secre­cy into peace­ful, qui­et con­tem­pla­tion. For Paw­son, the biggest hur­dles of this project had to do with engi­neer­ing, liken­ing the issues to “try­ing to put heat­ing in the pyra­mids.”

Art Beyond Explanation

It’s worth reit­er­at­ing that this was all done in order to dis­play but a por­tion of one man’s art col­lec­tion, but it is nonethe­less open to the pub­lic by appoint­ment, and where the hand of the archi­tect left off, Feuer­le’s work con­tin­ues, and it is by no means any less pre­cise in its intent. Your expe­ri­ence as a vis­i­tor begins when the muse­um’s employ­ees, don­ning black silk jack­ets, cus­tom-made by a design­er in Tai­wan, open the door and escort you down into the bunker’s low­er lev­el. As soon as the door is shut, you find your­self engulfed in pitch dark­ness, after which you are treat­ed to a record­ing of John Cage’s Music for Piano No. 20, offi­cial­ly sig­nal­ing the begin­ning of your expe­ri­ence in the col­lec­tion. Med­i­ta­tive in its approach, it is intend­ed as a means to reset the sens­es, dis­tance you from the noise and bus­tle of life above ground, and direct your atten­tion to the art that is to come. The thick­ness of the muse­um’s walls pre­vent any chance of mobile phone recep­tion, so you can be assured that you will not be dis­tract­ed by a ran­dom noti­fi­ca­tion while you remain down below.

As you become accus­tomed to the silence and dark­ness, a vague glow appears at the edge of the room, you are then direct­ed to slow­ly approach this light, which leads you to the main room. As you enter the exhi­bi­tion hall, you are greet­ed with the sight of Khmer sculp­tures, flu­id and smooth in their ren­der­ing, cap­tured in the moment of effort­less motion. There is a thou­sand-year-old head of a Khmer war­rior, uncan­ni­ly mod­ern in his essence, with jew­el­ry hang­ing from his ears and a braid­ed hair­style that would not be total­ly out of place to encounter among the trendy passer­by’s in the streets above. Fur­ther on, oth­er fig­ures are on dis­play, next to pho­tographs on the walls. Again, there are no labels for any of the works, only the aid of the muse­um’s guides should you have any ques­tions, answers whis­pered back to you in hushed tones in order to pre­serve the qua­si-monas­tic silence of the space. 

As you con­tin­ue on, you will not miss the atten­tion to detail when it comes to the light­ing. While sparse, it is inge­nious­ly pre­cise, cast­ing just the right amount on each piece to empha­size the full essence of the work. With no win­dows, sky­lights, or oth­er sources of nat­ur­al light, the zero point of the space is total dark­ness, which implies a cer­tain total­i­ty when it comes to con­trol­ling light, and it is this approach that allows this ele­men­tal func­tion, essen­tial to our per­cep­tion of any visu­al medi­um, to be fine­ly tuned to each indi­vid­ual piece. Just as there are spots in the room with no light, there are no works on dis­play there either, and in time your expec­ta­tion of both becomes inter­twined, as if down in this room, the pres­ence of art nat­u­ral­ly makes light appear.

The Mission of Connection

This is all, of course, part of Feuer­le’s holis­tic approach to expe­ri­enc­ing art, where he ele­vates feel­ing and engag­ing with the art (some­times one piece for hours at a time) over pure­ly study­ing it as an arti­fact, under­stand­ing its his­tor­i­cal con­text, pos­sess­ing a cer­tain back­ground of knowl­edge before enter­ing the space, and so forth. For the Khmer pieces in his col­lec­tion, Feuer­le has not­ed on sev­er­al occa­sions that he believes the art is shaped by stom­ach and gut feel­ing, where­as the Chi­nese works fur­ther ahead in his col­lec­tion come from the mind, under­lin­ing the dif­fer­ences between the two cul­tures and their respec­tive approach­es to art. It is for the sake of this dia­logue that the Feuer­le Col­lec­tion exists in the first place, and it is a dynam­ic and ever-chang­ing dia­logue, as the works here are moved and rearranged on a semi-reg­u­lar basis.

A per­fect exam­ple is seen in the com­bi­na­tion of a Khmer sculp­ture of a deity belong­ing to the Hin­du tra­di­tion (Cam­bo­dia was a major cen­ter of Hin­duism out­side of India until the 14th cen­tu­ry) and a con­tem­po­rary steel sculp­ture by British-Indi­an artist Anish Kapoor. While one work was pro­duced cen­turies ago in Asia and made with a clear rev­er­ence for reli­gious tra­di­tion, the oth­er was cre­at­ed recent­ly in the West and instead focus­es on a mate­r­i­al view of the world. Kapoor, whose father’s side of the fam­i­ly is from India, a nom­i­nal­ly Hin­du cul­ture, was brought up in a house­hold that did not cen­ter around any reli­gious val­ues at all. The oppor­tu­ni­ty to con­trast the two works is inter­est­ing if you come with this con­text already in mind, but mere­ly observ­ing the works as they are will stim­u­late a con­ver­sa­tion all of its own, and this can be said to be Feuer­le’s entire mis­sion.

Provocative Pairings

The Feuer­le Col­lec­tion’s oth­er area of spe­cial­ty is its diverse col­lec­tion of Chi­nese fur­ni­ture. Some of its most notable trea­sures include a rec­tan­gu­lar white mar­ble table dat­ed to the Qing dynasty, used only once a year, when the Emper­or would sit and have tea with his moth­er on the day of his birth­day. It’s spe­cif­ic sig­nif­i­cance was only dis­cov­ered when Feuer­le approached the Palace Muse­um in Bei­jing in the hopes of get­ting more infor­ma­tion on the piece, only to shock the researchers of the muse­um, who, up until that moment, believed that the table was com­plete­ly lost to time. Fur­ther research also uncov­ered that a lac­quer chair from the same peri­od had come from the emper­or’s bed­room. In con­trast to the grav­i­tas of roy­al fur­nish­ings, a daguerreo­type print of a sim­ple mat­tress, shab­by and worn in, hung above the mar­ble table.

Fur­ther on, a lac­quered red lute table from the 16th cen­tu­ry is on dis­play, also designed to be used by the emper­or, Feuer­le believes that the piece was exe­cut­ed with a lot of empa­thy in mind. To him, the idea to present some­one as high­ly regard­ed as the ruler of the king­dom behind a lute like any reg­u­lar indi­vid­ual is a stag­ger­ing thought. Above the table hangs anoth­er pho­to print, this time a close­up of a fig, cut open and fac­ing the cam­era.

The sug­ges­tive nature of the pho­tos on dis­play are no coin­ci­dence. For Feuer­le, there is a latent erot­ic ele­ment to all of the Chi­nese fur­ni­ture he pos­sess­es, which he tries to accen­tu­ate with the pho­tographs. Some instances are more sub­tle, such as the place­ment of a pho­togram of smoke forms by Adam Fuss in between two Ming dynasty book­shelves; oth­ers are com­plete­ly explic­it in their eroti­cism, such as anoth­er of Arak­i’s works, this time a por­trait of a naked woman tied and strung up by rope in front of a stone bench.

Spaces for Collaboration

Last­ly, there are the works of con­tem­po­rary art that stand on their own, per­haps the most sig­nif­i­cant of these is the bronze sculp­ture com­mis­sioned by Feuer­le from artist Cristi­na Igle­sias, Pozo XII, which takes the form of a basin or val­ley with com­plex roots as if from trees or sinew from a body unseen, depend­ing on how you look at it, and run­ning water that works it way through the mid­dle of the piece in a stream, yet it is not quite a foun­tain. It was well paired with the near­by sculp­ture by Zeng Fangzhi, which seemed to be the branch­es of a dead tree work­ing their way upwards, yet with an odd­ly anthro­po­mor­phic shape, eas­i­ly mis­tak­en for a human form.

The Col­lec­tion occa­sion­al­ly opens itself up for con­tem­po­rary artists to dis­play or per­form their works in tem­po­rary exhibits in what is called the Silk Room, named for the pitch black cur­tains which sep­a­rate the room from the oth­er halls. Report­ed­ly, Feuer­le had the cur­tains made all the way in Thai­land to get them in that col­or, from Jim Thomp­son, a com­pa­ny named after a man that was known to have revi­tal­ized the entire Thai silk indus­try. What’s more, it was a very spe­cial order, as even they had nev­er done cur­tains that way before.

Spaces for Reflection

Beyond the main exhi­bi­tion halls of the Feuer­le Col­lec­tion, there is still more to dis­cov­er. The so-called “Lake Room” is a small space sep­a­rat­ed from the main hall by panes of glass, con­tain­ing a small body of water that was there even pri­or to the ren­o­va­tions. Struck by what he called the “ele­men­tal feel­ing” of the water’s pres­ence in the space, Feuer­le opt­ed to forego remov­ing the water out­right, instead, the space was cleaned and a geot­her­mal heat pump was installed which now reg­u­lates the tem­per­a­ture with­in the gallery while vis­i­tors can wit­ness the still waters reflect the space around them.

In anoth­er part of the space, vis­i­tors can do some reflect­ing of their own. The “Sound Room” is just that, a sec­tion with a large hang­ing gong used pro­duce sounds for med­i­ta­tion and con­tem­pla­tion. Every first Sat­ur­day of the month there is a gong bath, in which vis­i­tors are invit­ed to sit and lis­ten to the sub­tle vibra­tions of the gong while on Thurs­days, the space holds a med­i­ta­tion ses­sion for an hour. If that was­n’t enough, the muse­um main­tains a rooftop gar­den which it opens to the pub­lic cer­tain nights out of the year to screen films or hold talks and par­ties.

An Ancient Ceremony Reawakened, by Appointment

Adja­cent to the Lake Room, there is still one more ele­ment of the musem left unmen­tioned, and it is cer­tain­ly a cru­cial aspect of Feuer­le’s gesamtkunst­werk – the Incense Room. The Feuer­le Col­lec­tion is the first art insti­tu­tion in the world to have cre­at­ed a ded­i­cat­ed space to per­form the ancient Chi­nese incense cer­e­mo­ny, a tra­di­tion that dates back almost two thou­sand years to the Han Dynasty in the 3rd Cen­tu­ry AD, with the cer­e­mo­ny as it can be expe­ri­enced today devel­oped some­time between the 10th and 13th cen­turies. By appoint­ment, a group of up two four peo­ple (who have €600 each) may attend the incense cer­e­mo­ny per­formed by a trained mas­ter.

This cer­e­mo­ny was devel­oped by Feuer­le and John Paw­son in tan­dem with Wang Chun-Chin, whom the Col­lec­tion’s web­site describes as “the most impor­tant schol­ar and mas­ter of the tra­di­tion­al Impe­r­i­al Chi­nese incense cer­e­mo­ny”, as well as advi­sor to Chi­nese art Jer­ry J.I. Chen and the fur­ni­ture work­shop Degoo-Chun­zai (for whom the lat­ter served as chief design­er); thor­ough­ly designed and re-envi­sioned as a mod­ern equiv­a­lent to its ancient pre­de­ces­sor, while still serv­ing as a liv­ing doc­u­ment of one of the pil­lars of Chi­nese schol­ar­ly tra­di­tion, the cer­e­mo­ny is intend­ed to pro­vide a “med­i­ta­tive and spir­i­tu­al” ele­ment to the muse­um, per Feuer­le, who him­self has been invit­ed to sev­er­al incense cer­e­monies in Chi­na and Tai­wan, and hoped to bring a par­tic­u­lar vision of this expe­ri­ence to Europe.

Ancient Ritual Meets Modern Innovation

Rig­or­ous­ly researched and even more metic­u­lous­ly per­formed, no sin­gle ele­ment is left unat­tend­ed. Guests are out­fit­ted with spe­cial­ly designed robes and slip­pers for the cer­e­mo­ny before they sit at one of the five chairs in the room. In the mid­dle of the room, the spe­cial­ty table on which the incense is burned is the work of none oth­er than Paw­son (the design process alone took him over a year to com­plete), based on pre­vi­ous designs of fur­ni­ture found in for­mer cer­e­mo­ny sites in Chi­na using African Black­wood, hand-cho­sen from two tons shipped direct­ly to the work­shop (which con­struct­ed the table over a fur­ther nine month peri­od).

The table fea­tures a recess in the mid­dle where­in a bowl with very thin­ly-sliced incense splin­ters are placed and lit, but only after they are cut on-site with a spe­cial knife (the incense mas­ter is required to have prac­ticed cut­ting with this knife for at least 300 hours before being allowed to per­form the rit­u­al). Tra­di­tion­al­ly, it would take sev­er­al hours for the wood to be heat­ed in order to pro­duce the oils for the incense, so an elec­tron­i­cal­ly-heat­ed sur­face was installed in the cen­ter recess to speed up the process. Nat­u­ral­ly, the incense pieces used in the rit­u­al are not the aver­age scents found in your local head shop, they are exceed­ing­ly rare wood-based incense such as Green Qinan, Bhutan Qinan, and Hainan Agar­wood. Like many aspects of the tra­di­tion­al Chi­nese schol­ar’s life, the cer­e­mony’s intend­ed pur­pose is to ele­vate the sens­es and use them to explore one’s own body and spir­it as well as to con­tem­plate nature as a whole.

Each Millimeter Counts

Désiré Feuer­le’s fas­tid­i­ous­ness is well-known and indeli­ble aspect of his approach towards cura­tion, a process where no detail goes uncon­sid­ered, this even extend­ed to his choice of air con­di­tion­ing sys­tems, admit­ting that he test­ed no less than a dozen can­di­dates before set­tling on one sys­tem he felt cre­at­ed the most pleas­ing sound. Sim­i­lar­ly, Feuer­le per­son­al­ly attend­ed to the place­ment and posi­tion­ing of each light source in the col­lec­tion, adjust­ing for each indi­vid­ual item on dis­play, some­times request­ing the most minute of changes. “Each mil­lime­ter counts” says Feuer­le in one arti­cle.

Some­times, his pre­ci­sion is met with coin­ci­dence in unex­pect­ed­ly har­mo­nious ways. The Cage com­po­si­tion that opens the vis­i­tor expe­ri­ence, for exam­ple, is itself root­ed in chance, part of a series of piano works com­posed by toss­ing coins in accor­dance with the I Ching, the ancient Chi­nese text of div­ina­tion, an unin­ten­tion­al echo of Feuerle’s own rev­er­ence for Asian phi­los­o­phy and aes­thet­ics. This detail was only dis­cov­ered after the piece had already been incor­po­rat­ed into the expe­ri­ence, Feuer­le chose to leave it, embrac­ing the unin­tend­ed align­ment with his cura­to­r­i­al vision.

Born to Collect

A life­long aes­thete, Feuer­le was born in Stuttgart to a doc­tor who pas­sion­ate­ly col­lect­ed every­thing from ancient Egypt­ian antiq­ui­ties to mod­ern pieces by Pablo Picas­so and Otto Dix. His father hav­ing impart­ed his love of col­lect­ing on him ear­ly on, it led him to begin his own col­lect­ing jour­ney at the age of eight, start­ing with antique keys and lat­er expand­ing to sil­ver teapots, post­cards, and even­tu­al­ly his­tor­i­cal art objects. His ear­ly inter­est in the form and sym­bol­ism of objects, such as ancient Chi­nese ter­ra­cot­ta toys and Baroque Euro­pean jugs, revealed a fas­ci­na­tion with the rela­tion­ship between func­tion and aes­thet­ic.

As a teenag­er, he bought his first Khmer sculp­ture, a small god­dess head, which now forms part of his Berlin-based Feuer­le Col­lec­tion. He stud­ied art his­to­ry in Lon­don and New York, took Sotheby’s fine art course, and began his career at Sotheby’s, where he vis­it­ed pri­vate col­lec­tors like Ronald Laud­er and quick­ly absorbed a key prin­ci­ple: true col­lect­ing is about qual­i­ty, not quan­ti­ty. On week­ends, he would make a rit­u­al out of going to the Met or the MoMA, study a sin­gle art­work in silence, then walk through Cen­tral Park to reflect, his own form of self-edu­ca­tion. In par­tic­u­lar, a Khmer sculp­ture he first saw at 17 remained vivid in his mind, deep­en­ing his inter­est specif­i­cal­ly in Khmer art but more broad­ly in art that tran­scends time and place.

By 1990, after work­ing for Michael Wern­er in Cologne and apprais­ing works by Baselitz and Polke, Feuer­le launched his own gallery. His shows broke with tra­di­tion, jux­ta­pos­ing Yves Klein and Joseph Beuys with Goth­ic Madon­nas, or plac­ing sculp­tures by Basque artist Eduar­do Chill­i­da along­side ancient Chi­nese ter­ra­cot­ta sculp­ture, only to lat­er dis­cov­er that the lat­ter artist was aware of the very same sculp­tures when cre­at­ing his work (as with the Cage pieces, this was one of many chance syn­chronic­i­ties in Feuer­le’s career). He was dri­ven by a need to cre­ate unex­pect­ed rela­tion­ships between objects, to col­lapse the dis­tance between cen­turies and cul­tures. “As a col­lec­tor you have to take all sorts of risks, you have to be adven­tur­ous,” he said, an ethos he lived ful­ly, once even attempt­ing to reach an ail­ing Fran­cis Bacon at his home in search of a col­lab­o­ra­tion dur­ing his twi­light years.

A Lifelong Connection to Asia

Since hav­ing first vis­it­ed Chi­na as a teenag­er in the late 1970s and notic­ing a sim­i­lar­ly curi­ous spir­it in the peo­ple he met, he remains deeply influ­enced by Asia. He now spends half the year in Asia, pri­mar­i­ly based in Bangkok with occa­sion­al trav­els through Chi­na, Japan, Tai­wan, Viet­nam, and Myan­mar, while his fam­i­ly is based in Barcelona.

The Feuer­le Col­lec­tion was co-found­ed with his wife Sara Puig, a mem­ber of the Puig fash­ion and per­fume fam­i­ly and cur­rent pres­i­dent of the Fun­dació Joan Miró in Barcelona. A fre­quent lec­tur­er and board mem­ber of insti­tu­tions such as the Tate Foun­da­tion, Cleve­land Muse­um of Art, and Museo del Pra­do, Feuer­le remains com­mit­ted to curat­ing inter-cul­tur­al, atem­po­ral encoun­ters that encour­age inti­mate, con­tem­pla­tive expe­ri­ences of art. Although he no longer col­lects keys and jugs as he did in his youth, Feuer­le admits he still pours water from a baroque 18th-cen­tu­ry Augs­burg jug dur­ing spe­cial occa­sions.

Why Berlin?

With a lifestyle that spans such a broad geo­graph­i­cal range, many won­der why Feuer­le chose Berlin of all places to host his col­lec­tion. Ini­tial­ly, Berlin did­n’t even cross his mind. Hav­ing con­sid­ered places as dis­parate as a remote Span­ish monastery in the moun­tains, old Ital­ian palazzi in Venice, a room in New York’s Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um, as well as loca­tions in Lon­don and Istan­bul, Feuer­le even­tu­al­ly real­ized that Berlin’s well-known open­ness to new forms of self-expres­sion as well as its rep­u­ta­tion as a youth­ful city serves as the per­fect ground for his explo­rations into curat­ing art in new and unortho­dox ways.

Feuer­le took a risk, and it appears to have paid off. With around 10,000 vis­i­tors annu­al­ly, more than half of them local, and an aver­age age of just 23, the col­lec­tion is steadi­ly embed­ding itself into the cul­tur­al fab­ric of the city. As Feuer­le puts it, “Many of our vis­i­tors are very emo­tion­al­ly touched. It has had an impact on them. It is an expe­ri­ence, which gives them good ener­gy, and many of our vis­i­tors talk about this like they would have gone through a gate, which calms them down, cre­at­ing an inner peace.”

An Institution for Contemplative Art

Beyond the per­ma­nent exhibits and cer­e­monies, the Feuer­le col­lec­tion hopes to keep the momen­tum going, over the years hav­ing opened its doors for tem­po­rary exhibits by artists such as Japan­ese con­cep­tu­al artist Leiko Ike­mu­ra and Eng­lish ceram­i­cist Edmund de Waal, as well as par­tic­i­pat­ing in city-wide events such as the Berlin Inter­na­tion­al Film Fes­ti­val and the Berlin Bien­nale, dur­ing which the space holds screen­ings, pan­el talks, din­ners, and more. Oth­er events includ­ed a tra­di­tion­al shakuhachi con­cert by Rei­son Kuro­da, as well as a joint tea cer­e­mo­ny, dance per­for­mance, film screen­ing by Po-nien Wang, Wai Kung, and Lin Wang, a syn­cret­ic expe­ri­ence inspired by The Moun­tain Spir­it, a poem from the Nine Songs by Qu Yuan, an ancient Chi­nese poet from the 4th and 3rd cen­turies BC.

By plac­ing his col­lec­tion in an under­ground bunker, Feuer­le may appear to be shield­ing it from a hos­tile world, as if art itself were under siege. Yet the effect is the oppo­site: rather than a fortress, the space becomes a refuge for focus and reflec­tion. Here, far from the noise of the out­side world, the only real threat is dis­trac­tion, and the only demand is to sur­ren­der to the art and tru­ly see it on its own terms.

The Feuer­le Col­lec­tion is locat­ed at Hallesches Ufer 70, 10963 Berlin, and is cur­rent­ly open by appoint­ment only from Fri­day to Sun­day, between 2 to 6 PM.