BERLIN.- The Museum für Asiatische Kunst of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin announced a major addition to its collection of contemporary East Asian art: The monumental photographic installation Family Tree by Chinese artist Mao Tongqiang enters the museum’s collection as a donation from the Sigg Collection. The Sigg Collection was assembled by Dr Uli and Rita Sigg as a landmark collection of Chinese contemporary art. The work is being shown for the first time in Berlin from 28 November 2025 in the exhibition All Under Heaven. Harmony in Family and State, curated by Maria Sobotka, at the Humboldt Forum.

Measuring around 400 square metres, Family Tree ranks among Mao Tongqiang’s most impressive works. Created over several years of extensive field research, it comprises photographic material of around 1,000 families. Family Tree captures the diversity of contemporary Chinese family structures while pointing to the profound transformations China has undergone—from the Confucian family order of the imperial era to the mobile and increasingly individualised forms of life in the 21st century.

The museum’s historical collections, which document art and material culture across many centuries, are significantly enriched by Family Tree. The work offers an immediate perspective on the societal transformations shaping modern China and complements the longue durée of our holdings with a concise contemporary dimension. Seen together, these temporal layers illuminate how radically household structures, social organisation and everyday life have changed within only a few decades.

The realisation and preservation of Family Tree—its scale, conceptual clarity and documentary precision—would not have been possible without the long-standing commitment of Dr Uli and Rita Sigg. Their collection is one of the world’s most significant archives of Chinese contemporary art, preserving key artistic positions and cultural narratives of China’s transformation since the 1970s. This generous donation now enables Family Tree to be shown for the first time ever—initially in a partial presentation due to its exceptional dimensions.

“We are deeply grateful to Rita and Uli Sigg for this important donation,” says curator Maria Sobotka. “Family Tree captures a reality that has transformed dramatically within just two generations: from agricultural labour to industrialisation, from village based social ties to urban mobility, from collectivist structures to capitalist everyday life. China’s vast internal migration has dispersed families, reshaped them and, at the same time, created new forms of intimacy. Family Tree reflects this contemporary condition with a clarity that gains its full depth in dialogue with our historical collections.”

“The donation from the Sigg Collection strengthens our museum in two important ways: it not only broadens our holdings with a major contemporary perspective, but also sharpens our ability to articulate the social relevance of art. Family Tree sets a benchmark for how we aim to relate tradition and contemporaneity, aesthetic quality and social reality even more closely in the future.” says Raffael Dedo Gadebusch, Head of the Museum für Asiatische Kunst.

The exhibition All Under Heaven brings together works by He Chongyue, Siren Eun Young Jung, Jane Jin Kaisen, Mirae Kate-Hers Rhee and Mao Tongqiang, exploring the complex relationship between family and state in China and Korea in the 20th and 21st centuries—between ideology, care and control.