The exhibition and the monography "Taken into Protection" is the attempt to reconstructe the provenance of the East Asian objects held in the museum. It is on display at the Old County until September 2024.
Previous research has focused mainly on post-war confiscations of private property, but this research project has shown that the Nazi German confiscations carried out in Lower Styria during the war should not be neglected. The biggest obstacle to the work is the few and scattered archival materials. In the case of post-war confiscation censuses, the scarce descriptions of objects make it difficult to reconstruct provenance. The knowledge or skills of the persons who carried out the inventories in the field are also a problem. In the circumstances of the time, there was neither the time nor the expertise to examine individual objects in detail. Thus, a quick glance at the external appearance of an object was probably sufficient to establish its provenance, on the basis of which it was assigned a provenance. The objects were thus stripped of most of their information and placed in museum depositories.
In addition to objects from the Collection of Asian and South American Objects, the exhibition also features for the first time presented East Asian objects held by the Museum as part of its Cultural History Collection. These are mainly various types of export Japanese and Chinese ceramics, made for the Western world according to European aesthetic tastes. The collection also includes East Asian porcelain, rare in Slovenia, decorated with metal fittings.