Academics to gather in US for Korean Art Week

While the global attention on the Korean art scene in the last few years has focused on the commercial side of things, 2022 Korean Art Week is to be held from Thursday to Sunday in the US with hopes to elicit interest in Korean art among academia and arts institutions.

The four-day Korean Art Week, jointly held by the Korea Foundation, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and Dartmouth College, will be a gathering of curators from US museums, academics and researchers who study Korean art at home and abroad.

The first session on Thursday will start with “The Dr. Allen W. Root Contemporary Art Distinguished Lectureship” organized by Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. The lecture and discussion will spotlight contemporary Korean ink painter Park Dae-sung, with the discussion led by MMCA director Yun Bum-mo.

The exhibition “Park Dae Sung: Virtuous Ink and Contemporary Brush” that shows ink paintings featuring the aesthetics of the East and the West is currently showing at Los Angeles County Museum of Art through Dec. 11. Another exhibition, "Park Dae Sung: Ink Reimagined" at Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College, runs until March 19, 2023.

“Korean Art Since the 1980s Dynamism and Expansion,” a symposium addressing critical practices and contemporaneity in Korean art and pluralization of Korean art, will be held Friday, according to the MMCA.

Presentations will include “Ways of Seeing: Some Motifs in Minjung Art (1980-1993)” by Park So-yang, associate professor in liberal arts and sciences and graduate studies at Ontario College of Art ＆ Design University; “Korean Art in the 1990s: ‘the Sensuous,’ ‘the Conceptual,’ and ‘the Critical’" by Shin Chung-hoon, assistant professor in the department of painting at Seoul National University; and “Paik Nam June and Korean Video Art” by Lim Shan, professor in curatorial studies at Dongduk Women's University.

Some 50 curators and researchers from 24 museums will participate in the curatorial workshop on Saturday and Sunday, sharing their insight on Korean art and knowledge of Korean art collections at overseas museums. A group of curators and researchers will visit the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston on Saturday to look at the museum’s Korean art collection.

By Park Yuna (yunapark@heraldcorp.com)