The Krzysztof Findziński Collection. A Cabinet of Memories. Asia

What is a collection? A set of things - or a record of a life?

The temporary exhibition The Krzysztof Findziński Collection presented objects from Asia, most of them donated to the Asia and Pacific Museum by Krzysztof Findziński, a collector who was also the subject of the show. It drew on the idea of the old cabinets of curiosities, the forerunners of today’s museums: spaces in which objects from different cultures, periods and orders stood side by side. Its biographical approach made it possible to follow how personal experiences became the beginning of a lifelong passion for collecting.

The narrative introduced Krzysztof Findziński (born 1948) and the history of his family, because experiences from his childhood and youth played an important part in his path to collecting, including growing up among objects brought back from Asia by his father. A childhood spent in Romania, the Netherlands and Vietnam, his parents’ interests and his own later journeys to Asia all shaped his aesthetic sensibility.

The exhibition culminated in the collector’s room, a space reconstructed from photographs of Krzysztof Findziński’s own flat. The more than 150 objects gathered there conveyed the atmosphere of the collector’s daily life.

What to expect

The show drew on a gift the museum received in 2026 (289 objects from a single collector) and on objects he lent. The layout was easy to follow. Nine selected pieces stood in the central section, each with two layers of text: Krzysztof Findziński’s own memory of how he came by it, and the curator’s note on what it was used for back home. At the end was the “collector’s room”, more than 150 objects reconstructed from photographs of his own flat.

A few objects worth finding (details from the museum’s audio-description texts):

• Ceremonial sabre - Vietnam, late 19th century, with a grip of mammoth tooth. The collection began with this sabre and a sword: in 1962, aged 13, Findziński spotted them in a Hanoi antique shop and sold his bicycle to buy them.
• Travel altar - China, first half of the 20th century, a small lacquered wooden cabinet; the museum listed a travel altar among the first souvenirs of that same trip.
• Bronze drum - Myanmar or Laos, a casting more than 60 cm across.
• Satsuma teapot - Japan, 19th century, stoneware.
• S-shaped trumpet - India, mid-20th century, a metre of copper. The second episode of the museum’s film series is about a different instrument, a Tibetan temple trumpet the collector found at a flea market.

For children there was a comic, “Podróż do Wietnamu” (Journey to Vietnam), with a task: find three objects from the drawings in the galleries. The exhibition page also carried short animations by students of the Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology and the first episode of the museum’s “Stories of the Collection” series, in Polish.

Curator: Dr Maria Szymańska-Ilnata; set design: Dr hab. Anna Skołożyńska-Cieciera.

Context

Krzysztof Findziński (born 1948) is a Polish graphic artist and painter who studied at the fine arts academies in Belgrade and Warsaw. His father, Tadeusz Findziński, was a diplomat, painter and collector, Poland’s ambassador to the Netherlands (1951-1957), North Vietnam (1960-1963) and Yugoslavia (1967-1971), which explains a childhood spent abroad in a home full of Asian objects. The “cabinet of memories” in the title plays on the cabinet of curiosities, the 16th-century European collection in which natural wonders, art and objects from distant lands sat side by side, and from which modern museums grew. The theme suited the venue: the Asia and Pacific Museum itself was founded in 1973 on the gift of another diplomat-collector, Andrzej Wawrzyniak. The museum showed Findziński’s own prints of the Far East in 2018, and in 2025 the Archaeological and Ethnographic Museum in Łódź exhibited his collection of African art.

Tickets and time

• The show was included in the museum ticket: 20 PLN regular, 12 PLN reduced. There was no separate ticket.
• Free on Thursdays - the exhibition page stated plainly that entry is free every Thursday.
• Access: the show was on the ground floor with step-free entry. It had easy-to-read texts, dyslexia-friendly texts, large print, tactile graphics, Polish Sign Language films and audio description of ten objects via QR codes.
• English on site: the museum did not state it. The colophon credited English translations, but the audio-description texts were in Polish and the museum’s English web page for the show carried only the Polish text.
• The show closed on Saturday, 31 October 2026.

Events

• 31.10.2026, 12:00-14:30 - Closing day of the show (the museum did not state the language): the museum announced a tour of the show at 12:00 led by Izabella Kośla-Śluzek, included in the exhibition ticket, and at 13:30 “Kawa z Kolekcjonerem” (Coffee with the Collector), an open meeting with Krzysztof Findziński and the curator, Dr Maria Szymańska-Ilnata, with free entry and limited places: programme

What the press says

No independent review was found, in English or Polish.

• Kontynenty, issue 49 (issue announced by the museum on 07.07.2026, Dr Maria Szymańska-Ilnata): an article by the curator herself on how a 1962 journey across Siberia to Hanoi started the collection; the quarterly was a media patron of the show, so read it as promotion rather than a review - museum’s announcement, in Polish

Updates

• 2 November 2026: the exhibition closed on 31 October 2026; the museum announced no extension.

After the show

On now at the Asia and Pacific Museum:

• Transformations. Old and New Photography from the Collections of the Asia and Pacific Museum - the first presentation in the museum’s history of its photographic archive, built thanks to more than 130 donors, among them diplomats and travellers, another story of private collections entrusted to the museum; until 24 January 2027.

Related exhibitions on now elsewhere in Warsaw:

• Rubensiana. Collecting Fascinations in Poland, 17th-21st Centuries - at Wilanów Palace until 31 December 2026; the culmination of a research project on Rubens in Polish collections, a show about collecting passions across four centuries.
• Images of Identity. The Collection of Berlin’s Pre-War Jewish Museum - at the Jewish Historical Institute until 30 November 2026; the story of one collection: over four thousand boards from the iconographic archive of the Berlin museum, discovered after the war in a warehouse in Lower Silesia.

Museum profile: Andrzej Wawrzyniak Asia and Pacific Museum.