About
Learn From Collections
Critical Thinking through Contemporary Art
Learn From Collections is an independent platform for critical looking. It approaches contemporary art through collections: what is kept, by whom, and why.
A practice space for critical looking.
Most writing on contemporary art begins with the artist or the exhibition. LFC begins with the collection. A collection is never neutral. It records choices: what was acquired, what was placed beside what, and what one person or institution decided was worth living with. Read alongside the works themselves, those choices open questions that a single artwork does not ask on its own.
LFC is not a course and not a gallery. It is a place to practise looking critically: to describe before interpreting, to place a work in its context, and to arrive at a position of one's own.
Beginning with Asian collecting in a global context.
Our first focus is Asian collecting within the global contemporary art world: collections formed in Asia, holding work from Asia and beyond, and the perspectives they bring to international art. These collections increasingly shape what contemporary art is seen to be, yet they are less often read as critical subjects in their own right. LFC is one window onto them.
Three layers of a work.
- The work
- The image shown in full, with a careful record: artist, title, date, medium, dimensions, and collection.
- The collector
- How the work entered the collection and what it has meant to live with it, in the collector's own words. These notes are primary sources, added as collectors contribute them.
- The reading
- Viewing notes, critical essays, and responses that take a position on the work.
DO2ON Garden
LFC's founding collection is DO2ON Garden in Wuhan, China, founded by collector Jiao Jingjia. It occupies Building No. 17 of the former Hanyang Arsenal, an industrial site established in the late Qing dynasty, now the Hanyangzao Cultural and Creative Park. The collection centres on the meeting of contemporary art, design, and technology, and spans painting, installation, photography, video, sculpture, print, and performance: more than 600 works, now catalogued in the LFC Collection.
DO2ON Garden is a co-initiator of LFC. Together we share one aim: to open, gradually and from the vantage point of an Asian collection, a contemporary art world that anyone can walk into, while keeping the language and the thinking professional.
The collection opens a living archive for study, while authorship, context, and access conditions remain protected.
About DO2ON GardenOpen to collections that can contribute to this field.
LFC is open to collectors and institutions whose collections can contribute to this field of study.
ContactLearn From Collections is an independent project initiated by FEI.
Copyright in every work remains with the artist. Images are shown for viewing and study only.