Korean Art Symposium

PATH TO MODERNITY:

Korean Art in a Changing World

Nichols Board of Trustees Suite

The Art Institute of Chicago

June 23–24, 2026

Day 1_Tuesday, June 23

4:00–5:00 PM | Keynote by Joan Kee

The Root and the Branch

In 1924, an anonymous Korean critic—unwilling or unable to sign his name during Japanese occupation—published a brief, unsparing critique of the colonial Government-General's annual art exhibition. "An exhibition is not an end in itself," he wrote. "Artistic research is the root; holding an exhibition is the branch." His words frame this keynote, which takes the occasion of Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art to ask what grounds the exhibition of Korean art in a foreign institution—and what histories of looking, collecting, and making such an exhibition inherits.

The Korean Art Symposium is generously supported by the Korea Foundation.

Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art is generously supported by the National Museum of Korea and Samsung Corporation. Additional support is provided by an anonymous donor.

Members of the Luminary Trust provide annual leadership support for the museum’s operations, including exhibition development, conservation and collection care, and educational programming. The Luminary Trust includes an anonymous donor, Karen Gray-Krehbiel and John Krehbiel, Jr., Kenneth C. Griffin, the Harris Family Foundation in memory of Bette and Neison Harris, Josef and Margot Lakonishok, Liz and Eric Lefkofsky, Ann and Samuel M. Mencoff, Sylvia Neil and Dan Fischel, Cari and Michael J. Sacks, and the Earl and Brenda Shapiro Foundation.

Day 2_Wednesday, June 24

9:30–10:00 AM | Registration

10:00–10:10 AM | Opening Remarks

10:10–11:30 AM | Panel 1

Colonialism and Korean Identity, Yeonsoo Chee
Shifting Terrains of Ink: Hangukhwa in Contemporary Korea, Sunglim Kim
Discussion moderated by Charlotte Horlyck

11:30 AM–1:00 PM | Lunch Break

1:00–2:20 PM | Panel 2

Abstraction in Korean Modern Art, Hyeseung Park
Abstract Painting by Korean Women Artists in the Postwar Period,

Yeon Shim Chung

Discussion moderated by Charlotte Horlyck

2:20–2:50 PM | Coffee Break

2:50–4:10 PM | Panel 3

Hyangto: Local Color’s Environmental Phenomenology, So Yoon Ryu
Half a History: Restoring the Missing North to Modern Korean Art, Jinyoung Jin
Discussion moderated by Charlotte Horlyck

4:10–4:50 PM | Concluding Remarks & Exhibition Viewing

Pleaes register here: Korean Art Symposium

Joan Kee, Judy and Michael Steinhardt Director, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University

Since the mid-1990s, Joan Kee has written extensively on Korean art from eighteenth-century landscape painting to the performances of Sung Neung Kyung — among her first published writings was an essay on Lee Bul's Majestic Splendor (1997). Her books include Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013), credited by several press outlets with igniting global interest in postwar Korean art; Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post-Sixties America (2019); and The Geometries of Afro Asia: Art Beyond Solidarity (2023), recipient of the 2024 Robert Motherwell Book Award. In 2014 she curated "From All Sides: Tansaekhwa on Abstraction" at BLUM, Los Angeles — the first significant U.S. exhibition of Tansaekhwa. A contributing editor to Artforum and editor-at-large for the Brooklyn Rail, her work has appeared at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, LACMA, and the Guggenheim. As an inaugural Ford Foundation Scholar in Residence at MoMA, she is co-editing Primary Documents Korea, a critical anthology of translated writings on twentieth-century Korean art, forthcoming in 2027.

Charlotte Horlyck, Professor and Head of School of Arts at SOAS, University of Londaon

Charlotte Horlyck concurrently holds the posts of Professor in the History of Korean Art and Head of School of Arts at SOAS. Her research focuses on Korean pre-modern and modern visual and material culture, collecting practices, and public displays of Korean art. Among her recent work is The Emergence of the Korean Art Collector and the Korean Art Market (Routledge, 2024). Her earlier monograph Korean Art – From the 19th Century to the Present (Reaktion Books, 2017) was awarded the Hendrik Hamel Book Prize by the Association of Korean Studies in Europe (AKSE) in 2023. In 2021 the Korean translation was included in the Sejong Books List. Her co-edited volume (with Michael Pettid, SUNY Binghamton) Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in Korea from Ancient to Contemporary Times (Hawai’i University Press, 2014) was selected for a Republic of Korea Ministry of Education Award (2015) for furthering interest in Korean studies. Her research has been funded by Korea Foundation, Academy of Korean Studies, Korea Arts Management Service, Smithsonian Institution, and AKSE, among other institutions. In 2024 she was awarded an Ewha Global Fellow position for research leadership by Ewha Womans University in Seoul.

Yeonsoo Chee, Korea Foundation Associate Curator of Korean Art, The Art Institute of Chicago

Yeonsoo Chee, a specialist in modern Korean painting and Joseon court art, joined the Art Institute of Chicago as the first curator of Korean art in 2020. In her role at the Art Institute, she is working to grow the Korean art collection and programs to support the museum’s goal of representing the expanse of art across the Asian continent. In November 2024, she debuted a newly expanded gallery of Korean art. Previously, she spent over nine years as a curatorial leader of the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, and in 2017 she was recruited by the Korean government to be the curator and director of exhibitions and publicity at the National Palace Museum of Korea. Her publications include Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art and Selections from the Korean Art Collection at USC Pacific Asia Museum.

Colonialism and Korean Identity

Korea was ruled by the Yi family—known outside the country as the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897)—when a series of Western military incursions reached its shores in the 1860s. From its founding, the Joseon court maintained a policy of seclusion, limiting diplomatic and cultural exchange primarily to China and Japan. This stance was further reinforced after the Opium Wars (1839–1860) and the subsequent weakening of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911).

As a result, Joseon Korea was largely unprepared to engage with Western imperial powers and proved ineffective in navigating the emerging diplomatic order. It was ultimately compelled to sign a series of unequal treaties, beginning with the Japan-Korea Treaty of 1876 and culminating in the Japan-Korea Annexation Treaty of 1910.

Within this turbulent context, efforts to modernize Korean art and articulate a sense of national identity became central concerns for many artists. The most systematic introduction of Western artistic practices occurred under the control of the Japanese colonial government, creating a fraught cultural landscape. Expressions of “Koreanness” in visual art could be interpreted by colonial authorities as acts of resistance, while adherence to officially sanctioned visual vocabularies risked being viewed by fellow Koreans as complicity with Japanese imperial ideology.

This presentation explores how Korean artists navigated these tensions during and after the colonial period. It also examines key terminologies—ilbonhwa (nihonga or Japanese painting), seoyanghwa (Western painting), and hangukhwa (Korean painting)—which are deeply entangled with Korea’s colonial history and the complex negotiation of artistic identity.

Sunglim Kim, Associate Professor of Art History, Dartmouth College

Sunglim Kim is Associate Professor of Art History at Dartmouth College, specializing in Korean art and visual culture. Her research explores the intersections of art, materiality, and cultural exchange across East Asia, with particular attention to ink painting, collecting practices, and the role of art in shaping social and political identities. She is the author of Flowering Plums and Curio Cabinets: The Culture of Objects in Late Chosŏn Korea (University of Washington Press, 2018) and several scholarly articles. Her recent work examines the relationship between art, business, and soft power in contemporary Korea, including corporate patronage and global cultural strategy. She has curated and organized exhibitions on Korean art, including traveling exhibitions on chaekgeori and the contemporary ink painter Park Dae-sung. She is currently working on projects on contemporary Korean ink painting and women in Korean art history.

Shifting Terrains of Ink: Hangukhwa in Contemporary Korea
This paper examines the transformation of hangukhwa (Korean ink painting) from the 1970s to the 2020s, situating its evolution within the broader contexts of South Korea’s social, economic, and political shifts. It approaches hangukhwa as a field shaped by overlapping temporalities, in which tradition, modernity, and contemporaneity are continuously reinterpreted. Since the late twentieth century, industrialization, urban expansion, and globalization have prompted artists to reconsider both the subject matter and formal language of ink painting. Traditional sansuhwa (landscape painting), in particular, has undergone significant transformation, extending beyond the depiction of nature to engage with contemporary environments. The spatial logic of landscape has been reimagined through urban imagery, where the shifting interplay of light and darkness in rapidly changing cityscapes becomes a lens to explore flux, alienation, and perception. At the same time, abstraction has emerged as a critical strategy, allowing ink to function beyond representation as a medium of gesture, materiality, and conceptual inquiry. Concurrently, renewed engagement with minhwa (folk painting) reflects a broader rethinking of hierarchy and cultural identity in a globalized art world. Issues of gender have also gained prominence, as women artists and feminist perspectives reshape the field. By tracing these interwoven developments, this paper argues that hangukhwa today operates as a dynamic and heterogeneous field, where tradition and experimentation, landscape and cityscape, figuration and abstraction intersect in new and productive ways.

Hyesung Park, Curator, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Hyesung Park received her B.A. in English Linguistics and Literature from Korea University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art theory and Art management respectively from Seoul National University. She also spent one year as a research fellow at Tokyo University, where she studied photography and modern Japanese literature.

Park previously worked as a curator at Seoul National University Museum of Art, and taught the history of Western and Asian modern arts in colleges. She has curated exhibitions such as Surrealism and Korean Modern Art (2025), Korean Embroidery in Modern Times (2024), Deouksugung Project: Garden of Imagination (2021), Arrival of New Women (2017), Pen Varlen 1916-1990 (2016), and Kim Byungki: Distribution of the Sensible (2014) so on. She is driven by reinterpreting modern and contemporary Korean art through a comparative cultural lens and to expanding its critical and historical horizons.

Abstraction in Korean Modern Art

Emerging in the twentieth century, abstraction is widely recognized as a hallmark of modernism, characterized by the pursuit of pure formal language and the expression of existential or inner subjectivity through non-figuration elements. In the context of Korean modern art, however, abstraction carries meanings that extend beyond stylistic concerns.

Introduced through Japan during the colonial period, Western-style art in Korea developed under conditions shaped by the Korean War, national division, authoritarian regimes, and rapid industrialization. Within this historical trajectory, abstraction functioned as an avant-garde force that both responded to and actively shaped its time. For individual artists and the broader art world alike, abstraction entailed a dual imperative: to participate in the universal and international language of modern art, while simultaneously constructing a distinct Korean identity. In this process, tradition operated not merely as a source of motifs, but as a method and attitude embedded in artistic practice.

This presentation examines the abstraction of major figures associated with Dansaekhwa—often referred to as “Korean monochrome paintings,” a representative “Korean modernism”—, whose works are featured in the gallery with the exhibition Korean National Treasure: 2000 Years of Art. It also introduces the first generation who laid the foundation for Korean abstract painting after encountering avant-garde abstraction and surrealism in Tokyo during the colonial period. By situating the abstraction paintings of the artists in relation to tradition, the presentation offers a comprehensive overview of the evolving meanings of abstraction in Korean modern art.

Yeon Shim Chung, Professor, Hongik University

Yeon Shim Chung holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. She previously served as an assistant professor in the Department of Art History at the Fashion Institute of Technology, SUNY, and was a co-curator of the 2018 Gwangju Biennale. In 2000, she participated as a researcher for the Nam June Paik retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum. From 2018 to 2019, she was a Fulbright Fellow and visiting research professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU. Chung has written extensively on modern and contemporary art, with a particular focus on Korean art. She published an anthology of writings by the critic Lee Yil (Anthology of Lee Yil, Mijinsa, 2013; English edition by Les Presses du Réel, 2018). In 2020, she authored and served as editor-in-chief of Korean Art from 1953: Collision, Innovation, Interaction, published by Phaidon in London. She is also the author of Contemporary Space and Installation Art (2015) and Korean Installation Art (2018), among numerous other publications. In 2021, Chung was the artistic director of the DMZ Art & Peace Platform, collaborating with Haegue Yang and other contemporary artists at the DMZ. She also directs an interdisciplinary research center at Hongik University, working with international scholars and emerging artists. Her recent book, The Making of Modern Korean Art: The Letters of Kim Tschang-Yeul, Kim Whanki, Lee Ufan, and Park Seo-Bo, 1961–1982, co-edited with Doryun Chong, was published in New York in April 2025. She is currently researching the intersection of Korean Dansaekhwa and Experimental Art, with a forthcoming book scheduled for release by Phaidon in London in November, 2026.

Abstract Painting by Korean Women Artists in the Postwar Period

This symposium talk examines how Korean women artists negotiated womanhood, subjectivity, and artistic trajectories through painting, beginning with Na Hye-seok (1896-1948), whom I consider the mother of Korean modernism, whose legacy was nonetheless marginalized and othered within dominant art historical narratives. The marginalization of women artists during this period was gradually challenged in postwar Korea through the expansion of advanced art education and the increasing opportunities for women to pursue studies abroad, particularly in France and the United States. For example, Lee Seundja (1918-2009) went to Paris in 1951 to continue her studies, while Wook-kyung Choi (1940-1985) moved to the United States in 1963 to attend the Cranbrook Academy of Art, before permanently returning to Seoul in 1979. Their abstract paintings are deeply intertwined with experiences of culutral alienation and diasporic subjectivity, which this presentation seeks to explore.

The talk then addresses the question, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Dansaekhwa Artists?,” à la Linda Nochlin, through an examination of the monochrome paintings of Lee Chungji (1943-2021), Yoon Miran (b. 1948), and Chin Ohc Sun (b. 1950); and of Chung Kyoung-Yeon (b. 1955) and Lee Hyangmi (1948-2007), whose works occupy the intersections of craft and experimental art, respectively. Although these artists were actively engaged in contemporary artistic developments, they were often excluded from both mainstream art history and later feminist art historiography, which became more fully articulated from the mid-1980s onward. Ultimately, this presentation aims to recover the obscured voices and struggles of women artists as they confronted social expectations of femininity and the fractures of subjectivity embedded in their artworks.

Soyoon Ryu, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago

Soyoon Ryu specializes in modern and contemporary Korean art. Her research and teaching span East and Southeast Asian art from the late nineteenth century to the present. Her interests include art’s engagement with land and the natural environment, artistic collectivism, rurality and regionalism, interregional art histories, and ethnographic practices in art. Ryu is currently developing a book manuscript that introduces the South Korean art movement, yaoe hyeonjang misul, as an entry point into interregional histories of artist groups who left urban centers to live in lands deemed peripheral within nationalist imaginaries, forging connections between land, living, and the environmental and material conditions of artistic production. Her work has received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Mellon Foundation, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), among others.

Hyangto: Local Color’s Environmental Phenomenology

Hyangtosaek 鄕土色, or “local color,” has elicited conflicting interpretations, at once as an expression of nationalist desire and as an instrument of colonial rule. Kim Bok-jin, a sculptor and member of Korea Artista Proletaria Federatio (KAPF), characterized local color as both a “depoliticized antithesis to socialist realism” and a “weapon for socialist class revolution.” This contradiction becomes even more pronounced in a transnational context: by promoting a uniformly tropicalized landscape across imperial Japan’s colonies – including Korea and Taiwan – local color contributed to Japan’s Pan-Asianist vision as a counterpart to the West. For art critics such as Yun Hui-sun, however, local color also resisted this imperial connotation, instead as a vehicle for articulating the region’s cultural and political sovereignty.

This presentation examines how local color painting could sustain such diametrically opposed claims through what I term “environmental phenomenology.” This intellectual current, which gained prominence across the Japanese Empire, conceived spatial constructs such as place, climate, and land through the corporeal interactions between human bodies and the natural world. Central to my argument is hyangto’s alignment with Nishida Kitarō’s notion of basho 場所 and Watsuji Tetsurō’s fūdo 風土, which legitimized the inscription of subjective and often conflicting meanings onto the land: a space that generates life, a site of agrarian labor and original accumulation, and a cipher of national or imperial territory. The ideological malleability of local color thus emerges from the particular role assigned to landscape painting during the colonial period, as a visual and spatial construct in which the desires of artists, beholders, and pictorial subjects toward the land could be staged simultaneously.

Jinyoung Anna Jin, Director, Charles B. Wang Center, Stony Brook University

Jinyoung Anna Jin, Ph.D., is an art historian, curator, and author specializing in modern and contemporary Korean art within global and transnational contexts. She serves as the director of Asian art and culture at Stony Brook University’s Charles B. Wang Center, and teaches in Asian and Asian American studies. Her research examines Cold War cultural exchanges, socialist modernism, and overlooked artistic networks linking Asia, Latin America, and beyond. Jin is the author of Art, War, and Exile in Modern Korea: Rethinking the Life and Work of Lee Qoede (2025). Through exhibitions, publications, and film projects, she works to reconnect marginalized artists and overlooked histories to broader global narratives. www.jinyoungannajin.com

Half a History: Restoring the Missing North to Modern Korean Art

The history of modern Korean art remains structurally incomplete, shaped not only by colonial rupture and postwar reconstruction but also by Cold War divisions. Artists who defected to North Korea have been systematically erased from textbooks, academic study, and wider cultural recognition, including major figures such as Lee Qoede (1913–1965), Bae Unseong (1900–1978), Kim Yongjun (1904–1967), Kim Manhyeong (1916–1984), Kil Jinseop (1907–1975), Chong Hyeonung (1910–1976), Lee Yeoseong (1913–?), Mun Haksu (1916–1988), and Park Munwon (1920–1973). Many of these artists were already central to artistic discourse before their defections and later became key contributors to North Korean art institutions, where they actively shaped debates on new visual languages and the future of North Korean art. Their exclusion from dominant narratives reveals the structural limitations of modern art history in South Korea.

Modernism has long been framed through a Eurocentric model that casts non-Western artists as derivative. This limitation becomes especially clear in the case of North Korean defector artists, as their work has been confined within rigid ideological interpretations.

This presentation moves beyond “recovering” these artists, examining their efforts to construct a national art aligned with leftist movements and repositioning them within the broader trajectory of global modernism. It argues that the inclusion of defector artists is essential to completing modern Korean art history, a history that reveals Korean artists as active participants in global networks linking Mexico, Eastern Europe, and East Asia.

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