Light at the End of a Dark Century: The Resurrection of Kyiv’s Khanenko Museum

The volume Art of Asia and the Islamic World. Kyiv: Safran Book, 2023, 352 pp., dedicated to the biggest collection of Asian Art in Ukraine, is under review. The main part of the book is divided into four chapters, devoted to a selection of objects from four different cultural clusters: Hinduism and Buddhism, China, the Islamic world, and Japan. Each section opens with a one-page introduction about the corresponding part of the collection, and each object is accompanied by a full-page photograph, sometimes with an enlarged detail, and a concise, informative description. The volume is edited by Hanna Rudyk, with contributions by Halyna Bilenko, Yuliia Fil, Oleksandr Halenko, Marta Lohvyn, Antonina Makarevych, Olha Novikova, Yevhen Osaulenko, Hanna Rudyk and Valeriia Yunda. Translated from Ukrainian by Tetiana Savchynska. The authors’ reconstruction of the early history of the museum is an extraordinary achievement, and surely not an easy task in the light of the disappearance of most of the Khanenko family archive following Varvara’s death, as well as the removal of labels and other identifications from objects during the Soviet period. Given the size of the collection, the 156 objects presented here are obviously only a small fraction of the museum’s holdings, but they have been thoughtfully selected to convey the diversity of the material, ranging from the grandeur of Tibetan thangkas depicting fearsome divinities such as Vajrabhairava and the war god Begtse, to small objects in which one can almost detect the artist’s sense of humour. One such piece that deserves a special mention is a nineteenth-century Chinese ivory carving of a cricket on a napa cabbage, an extraordinarily lifelike creation that also happens to be a three-dimensional rebus signifying prosperity and good fortune. This book is an aesthetic delight that will make compelling reading for scholars and non-specialists alike, and it fully achieves its aim of informing the world about the existence of an outstanding house of treasures which, we may sincerely hope, will at last be allowed to enjoy the peace it has long deserved.