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네이버 공유 카카오 공유 트위터 공유 페이스북 공유

Curators’ Valuable Visit to Korea for Extending Korean Art

October 26, 2009 marked the beginning of the second decade of the academically rich and programmatically far reaching series of annual workshop-conference sessions organized and presented by the Korea Foundation for the benefit of foreign curators of Korean art from around the world. Over three dozen curators and other museum and academic professionals - representing a full range of large and small institutions, from highly visible municipal institutions to smaller university-based galleries – came together for the study and appreciation of Korean art in a unique program of lectures, seminars, and site visits, brilliantly presented, as in previous workshops, by the KF team organizers. The distinguished roster of individual curators that have attended over the years now numbers in the hundreds and the worldwide geographic distribution of their participating museums attest undeniably to the widespread reach, international acclaim, and professional approbation of this invaluable workshop.



In past years, topics recommended, reviewed, and approved with careful deliberation (and I am certain, considerable passion) by a blue-ribbon advisory panel, composed of academic and museum advisors across Korea convened by the KF, had addressed a series of presentations focused on the unique forms, characteristics, and qualities of Korean art, which encompassed a vast period bridging over 2,000 years of sustained cultural activity on the Korean Peninsula. In the first ten years of the program, topics defined salient features of Korean art in its varied traditional, modern, and contemporary forms and contexts. These have ranged from the intensive examination of innovative periods of Korean cultural activity, such as last year’s program devoted to the arts and neo-Confucian culture of the Joseon royal court, to the focused study of a particular medium, as in the 2001 workshop dedicated to Korea’s world-class ceramic traditions, from bronze-age beginnings to the final years of the royal court-sponsored kiln production at Bunwon in 19th century. Other years have featured a particular genre, including the arts of Buddhism (2002) and traditional folk and craft industries (2006).

As is entirely appropriate to any scholarly activity with such a proven record of programmatic ambition, scholarly success, and critical internal review by its organizers, which is certainly the case with the Korea Foundation’s Workshop for Korean Art Curators at Overseas Museums, agendas change, and this year’s theme departed somewhat from past topics. Understandably, since its beginning in 1999, the first ten workshops were dedicated to a focused internal view of Korean art that brought to the fore local, regional, and national characteristics of style, subject matter, and iconography, thereby laying broad aesthetic and cultural foundations for an informed study of Korean art for participating curators. This year, however, the program addressed Korean art from a cross-cultural perspective: traditional arts of Korea in relationship to China and Japan, and after the end of the Joseon Dynasty, modern movements in an increasingly international environment, while contemporary practice was considered through the lens of globalization.

For me and other participants in previous KF workshops this was a particularly felicitous and welcome agenda for many reasons. When the first workshop convened a decade ago, most overseas curators who are charged with the care and research of their museum’s Korean holdings held no university study in the art and culture of the Korean Peninsula, and instead came from backgrounds of Chinese or Japanese visual culture, or rarely, as in my own situation, from Western art history. With this year’s topic, I experienced a subtle yet important redirection, in which invited participants played a much more active role, in union with the workshop’s distinguished roster of presenters, by bringing to the wide-ranging set of lectures and seminar topics their own specialized backgrounds and knowledge of traditional and modern East Asian and contemporary developments outside Asia.

This confluence of local, regional, and international talent resulted in a highly satisfying and sometimes free-wheeling discourse from among the Asian specialists gathered, including foreign curators and specially invited academics from abroad, with speakers from among Korea’s top museums, universities, and institutes. This was strikingly apparent in the extended question-and-answer sessions following each of the six excellent lectures and in the workshop members’ engaged response to the three seminar presentations by Hyunsoo Woo (Philadelphia), Richard Peg (Chicago), and Marsha Haufler (Lawrence, Kansas), which each addressed the complicated and all too often misunderstood nature of foreign artistic sources, internal reception, and local transformations, and the mechanisms of such exchanges, that was at the heart of this year’s workshop theme.

As in other workshops, the structure of this year’s activities was superbly arranged, with the seamless transitions from the keynote presentation to the final lecture five days later. I was particularly impressed also with the relevance of related visits to local museum collections and exhibitions. For me, a particularly noteworthy example was a morning lecture dedicated to early Joseon court and scholar painting in relationship to Chinese models, followed later in the day by the visit to a small, select exhibition at the Leeum (Samsung Museum) of masterpieces by the 18th-century master Jeong Seon, who did so much to redirect such foreign painting styles and motifs to a inventive, highly personal Korean aesthetic.

This year, the workshop was centered in Seoul, the Joseon capital city, which was an appealing choice since much of the traditional painting under consideration was made in the cultural orbit of the royal court located there. Yet, field trips are always sa favorite of many workshop curators, and it was a brilliant choice to select the scenic wonders of Chungju Lake, located several hours outside Seoul by bus. Aside from the relevance of this mountainous region as the Koreanized variant of the Eights Views of the Xiao and Xiang Rivers of Song art and literature, called the Eight Scenic Beauties at Danyang. Reflecting on this trip, I was struck by the arduousness of the journey made by those intrepid artists who were inspired by the fantastic rock formations, forested valleys, and sheer natural beauty of the region before the ease of modern travel. Aside from the programmatic benefits of desired destination, field trips such as this one afford the chance to observe the sights, sounds, smells, foods, and activities of rural Korea, which have played such important roles in the country’s artistic heritage, just as metropolitan Seoul expresses the contemporary environment and international outlook of many of the country’s outstanding living artists. On this particular journey, I was once again amused and struck by the fascination of Korea’s wonderful motor-rest stops among workshop members, and how quickly participants disappear into the many food stalls and return to the buses with a wondrous diversity of local Korean treats.

A welcome trend in this year’s workshop was the continued and growing presence of a younger generation of museum curators with degrees in Korean Studies, who have recently taken up junior and senior positions in foreign museums, which have begun to establish endowed curatorial positions in Korean art. Paralleling this development is the rise of “new faces,” young curators from abroad attending the workshop (and sometimes Korea) for the first time and often representing museums new to the workshop. This situation reflects, I believe, other highly positive ripple effects from the KF workshop program. For instance, the workshop has undeniably raised levels of understanding and appreciation of Korean art in the professional activities of its participating curators. Likewise, it has brought deeper and wider awareness of Korea’s unique position within the East Asian cultural area to foreign museums - a felicitous situation that parallels the host of new galleries dedicated to Korean art appearing each year in museums in Australia, Canada, England, the United States, and elsewhere. As my generation approaches retirement, I see in such developments both continuity and a newfound maturity in the workshop that bodes well for its continued success as one of the most meaningful voices in Korean art studies on the world stage.

The workshop was planned to coincide with celebrations organized by the National Museum of Korea on the centenary of Korea’s first national museum, founded by the last king of the Joseon Dynasty at the close of the short-lived Empire of Korea (Daehan) and housed in a late Joseon palace complex in the center of Seoul. In addition to a forward-looking, day-long conference dedicated to the roles of museums in the 21st century, workshop members were extended invitations to other, optional events organized by the National Museum of Korea. I was fortunate, indeed, to have been part of an international audience of museum directors, curators, foreign diplomats, and other VIPs taken on a spirited tour of the original museum complex of palace pavilions and sites in the Changgyeonggung Palace by the Director of the National Museum of Korea, Dr. Choe Kwang-shik, whose dedication to museum education makes him a special and valued friend of the KF workshop and its mission.



Over the years, participants have come to recognize gratefully that the workshop has in many ways surpassed its stated goals of raising awareness, appreciation, and the better understanding of those Korean art and artifacts today located in public collections outside Korea. It is harder perhaps to quantify other very tangible results of each year’s workshop activities. Certainly, 11 years of annual meetings have brought about a rich and ongoing exchange of recent research findings and other news of activity in the field among workshop curators and their collegial counterparts in Korea. I feel deeply that there is an equally meaningful and auspicious by-product of the workshops: the complex network of contacts and information that has arisen among the foreign curators themselves. This has simultaneously translated into a fruitful, multifaceted, and mutual intersect ion with innumerable Korean museum directors and curators, academics, and artists, many now no longer simply professional contacts but personal friends thanks to our introductions through the KF.

During the National Museum of Korea’s centennial celebrations and exhibitions, I began to reflect on how much the KF workshop has in a relatively brief period of activity helped establish another type of Korean art museum that is eminently suited to the internationalism of the present century: a global museum of the mind, without physical walls. It consists of the many individual public collections of Korean art overseen by past and present workshop curators. It is united by shared commitments to such core museum values as research and preservation, informed by up-to-date scholarship, and fueled by an array of on-line databases, inventive Internet technologies, and the global reach of the Internet itself. It is ultimately an unbounded institution, fostered by the dedicated efforts and goodwill of the Korea Foundation and its Workshop for Korean Art Curators at Overseas Museums.

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