Dossiers

Anatoli Donkan is a Nanai who grew up on the Amur River. Having worked as a mate on fishing boats for some years he started to study Fine Art, founding the Amur Art Museum in Vladivostok together with the painter Mareile Onodera. Ever since, he has been studying the processing of fish skin into clothing among the peoples of the Amur, formerly one of their central activities. As he reports, “During my travels along the Amur in the middle of the 1990s I still found gloves made from fish skin which the fishermen from the Kolkhoz used to wear. The Kolkhozy have disappeared, but the robust gloves survived. I still did not know about the secret of making them then. I found out about it later from the elders whom I asked about this.”

Anatoli Donkan lives in Germany. His workshop is located in Viechtach, in the Bavarian Forest where he operates his fish skin museum with Mareile Onodera. His work is dedicated to the revival and preservation of this traditional Nanai activity that has almost disappeared.