THE DRACHEN COLLECTION: A LEGACY FOR GENERATIONS TO COME

Ali Fujino

The Drachen Foundation kite collection is carefully packaged by Greg Kono to move to its new home.

For almost three years, the Drachen Foundation Board has explored possibilities of selling the extensive Drachen collection in order to ensure its long term existence as well as to finance the future of the Drachen Foundation website. Our priority was to keep the collection in as few “pieces” as possible – the logistics of selling individual kites and objects would make a large project huge. We tried marketing the traditional Eastern kites (mainly paper and bamboo), the contemporary Western kites (ripstop and fiberglass), and finally the Cody collection of documents, glass plates, and photographs. The Board entertained possibilities to place the collections, including auctioning the Cody material at New York’s Bonhams auction house. None

of these options materialized, but another exciting one came to us from an unlikely corner.

Introduced to us by New Zealand’s Peter Lynn, Cho Byong Ook from Korea began a dialogue on behalf of Wind Park, Inc. to acquire the entire Drachen collection to be the foundation of Wind Park’s kite museum collection. Cho was interested and committed enough to come to Seattle and then Tieton, Washington, to personally see the collection and make the decision to acquire or not. With Ali Fujino as our guide, Cho and I visited museum sites in the Seattle area, including the Seattle Art Museum’s Sculpture Garden and the always-interesting Museum of Flight. Ali’s museum background proved to be a great asset to Cho as almost every subject was discussed: architecture, storage, marketing, and exhibit design, among others. Cho proved to be an interested and motivated student, all before even seeing the Drachen collection.

Ali Fujino

What started as an archive of kite material became a living collection as notable kitefliers donated their collections. There are now over 3,000 items in the Drachen collection.

Ali Fujino

We are working hard to have the entire Drachen Foundation collection boxed and ready for shipment by mid-summer, to arrive in Korea by early fall.

The two and a half hour trip to Tieton gave Cho a chance to relax and sight-see as we traveled from urban Seattle to very rural Tieton. Once there, we jumped into the midst of the Drachen collection: over twenty years’ worth of kite collecting that took on a life of its own (as many collections do). Our intent when we started the Foundation was to never be a museum, but rather to provide a study center and archive of kite material. That archive became a living collection when notable kitefliers donated their collections to us (including the bill lockhart and Betty Street collection, the Bonnie and Ed Wright collection, miniature kites from Harm van Veen, the Stormy Weathers collection, just to name a few). Along the 20 year journey, the Foundation also made decisions to acquire kites that we thought were particularly threatened, interesting, or beautiful and should be included in our collection. Thai chula and pakpaos, Cambodian kleng ek, Malaysian waus all c a m e t o u s t o c o m p l e m e n t t h e contemporary Western kites.

As we showed kites to Cho, it was a bittersweet moment for Ali and I. Like saying hello to old friends, we uncovered beautiful and unique kites that had been generously donated to us, as well as treasures that we had decided to acquire. Of particular interest was showing Cho the Korean kites donated to us by Dr. Forriere through the Colectif Zoone. Over 100 years old, these kites will finally make the journey home.

After the trip to Tieton and Seattle, I followed Cho to Korea to tour the sights of Jeju Island. By the time he left Seattle, Cho had the go- ahead to make formal arrangements to purchase the collection, and now it was my turn to see the site of the future Kite Museum of Korea. Jeju is a destination tourist attraction and one of the traditional spots that Korean newlyweds spend their honeymoons. I was impressed by the number of museums, galleries, and attractions on every part of the island. Cho was able to show me the land where the kite museum will be located. Backed by the island’s volcano and with a view downhill to the ocean, it is a spectacular site that will only get better as work on the museum progresses. So this will be the new home of the Drachen Foundation collection, but first we have to get the kites safely to Korea.

For the last three months, Ali has been doing the heavy lifting to prepare the collection for transport. Twice, we have formed a four-person team (Ali, Jose Sainz, Greg Kono, and I) to travel to Tieton to pack kites into boxes for safe transport to Korea. Every kite is individually plastic-wrapped for protection from moisture and mildew, then mounted and fitted into their final shipping boxes. In two trips, we’ve managed to pack all of the paper and bamboo kites, many of the contemporary ripstop kites, and, thanks to Ali alone, the books of the Drachen library. In our next trip, we’ll deal with the many odd-sized objects and the creative problem-solving will begin. How will all of these things fit into one shipping container? We are working hard to have the entire collection boxed and ready for shipment by mid-summer, to arrive in Korea by early fall.

We could not be happier! The collection will live well beyond our years in an accessible new location on the world kite landscape. ◆