Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art Conference Research Paper / Contemporary Korean Ceramics: Re-interpretation of its Heritage and Advancement into the 21st Century (original) (raw)

"Cultural Exchanges Between Korea and the West. Artifacts and Intangible Heritage"

Cultural Exchanges Between Korea and the West. Artifacts and Intangible Heritage, 2023

This volume encompasses the proceedings of the First International Conference of the East and West in Korean Studies project Cultural Exchanges Between Korea and the West: Artifacts and Intangible Heritage, organized by Jong Chol An and Ariane Perrin in the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in May 2021 with the support of the Academy of Korean Studies. Following an interdisciplinary approach from such fields as history, heritage studies, history of art and religious studies, nine essays were selected that best illustrate the main themes of the conference. This richly-illustrated publication presents little-known historical documents and various artifacts that had been lost to time within various institutions, private collections or museum collections, tracing back their history and significance.

Art and Architecture of Korea: Tradition and Modernity

ANCIENT LAND

For a long time, Korea has experienced the powerful influence of Chinese culture and art. Perceiving the best traditions of Chinese art, the Korean people creatively processed it and created their own remarkable original art. Early monuments of Korean culture have not survived our time, as they were usually destroyed during numerous invasions of foreign troops into the country. Only after the Second World War did the Korean people for the first time get the opportunity to study their native country, its history, and culture of the past. The article examines Korean architecture and art from the point of view of tradition and modernity.

Foreword (to) "Symbols of Identity: Korean Ceramics from the Collection of Chester and Wanda Chang"

2011

[Foreword only, by P.M. Taylor; entire book is currently available in "Books" section, below.] An important theme of this volume is the relationship between ceramics and cultural identity, especially as it relates to a particular family’s collection, and also to the broader study of the personal and social aspects of collecting. The book thus forms a contribution not only to the study of Korea’s material heritage but also to Korean-American or Asian-American studies, and to the history of collecting. It will surely be of interest to art as well as social historians, and to all those who appreciate the aesthetic quality of Korea’s ceramic art. The authors’ “behind-the-scenes” study of this private collection included the creation of an extensive research database about it, not only the ceramics included in this volume but also paintings, costumes, bronze works, and many other objects that could form the basis for subsequent studies. The collection includes some important twentieth-century ceramics that have not been included within this volume; these await study alongside other works by contemporary artists in this wide-ranging collection. As the authors emphasize, the component of the Chang collection selected for publication here has been extensively tested using thermoluminescence testing. For this reason, these objects constitute an important “type collection” of tested pieces for this type of materials analysis, against which other ceramic works may be compared. This book should therefore serve as an important reference for work on its topic, as a unique and well-illustrated introduction to this private collection and its significance; and hopefully also as a stimulus for other studies within this and related private collections.

Reinvented and Re-Contextualized: Cultural Property in Korea during Japanese Occupation

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCE, 2014

This study aims to review the role of Imperial Japan for the establishment of Korean art history during Japanese occupation. Japanese intellectuals built the theoretical basis for the art history of Korea. The art of Korea was discovered, restored, and re-contextualized by Japan through the art historical system. The paradigm went through the process of de-contextualization and re-contextualization. Those cultural properties were arranged in art historical timeline according to the taste of Imperial Japan. For them, the value of Korean art was supplementing blanks of the oriental art, between China and Japan. Korean art history as a modern academic discipline established by Imperial Japan according to their ideal paradigm. Japan dominated and monopolized the hegemony of knowledge about Korea. They also made Koreans accept their paradigm through public education and school books. The way of seeing in Korean heritage was made by Imperial Japan in Modern Era.

Preservation Of The Korean Masonry Monuments

WIT Transactions on the Built Environment, 1970

The south Korea has many interesting civil and religious historical buildings. Part of these are still in wood, another part, a few number are in stone. Between the latter ones we can put the Buddhist pagodas with their interesting structure, a local interpretation of the original Indian stupa. The paper presents the preliminary results related with cooperative research between Italians and koreans researchers and particularly the historical aspects and some consideration on the alteration of materials.

The Role of elite subcultures in the preservation of traditional culture and art of Medieval Korea

The Role of elite subcultures in the preservation of traditional culture and art of Medieval Korea This article, based on the philosophical-sociological approach to the consideration of traditional culture and on the theory of sociocultural stratification declares that a complex, multilayered structure of society provides an appropriate protection to the national culture and through it, to national art. The Korean aristocratic society guided by Confucian standards and patterns since ancient times was predisposed to create the certain range of elite subcultures (munin, hwawon, gisaeng, neoconfucian philosophers and intellectuals), similar to each other, preset to reproduce and translate the values created in mainstream Chinese culture and to form its own specific directions, genres and styles through medieval times. Modernization and westernization that began at the end of the 19 th century with its new challenges and objectives contributed to the disintegration of syncretism, typical for the Far Eastern culture and art of Medieval Times, and, as a result, the disintegration of elite subcultures. Introduction The culture of the Korean Peninsula is a very complicated system represented by the specific combination of traditional and modern components. This specificity is conditioned by internal and external circumstances, the key ones being the estrangement of ethnic groups living on the Northern and Southern part of the Peninsula, globalization, urbanization and the fast growth of mass culture, mostly represented by the Hallyu (" Korean Wave ") phenomenon and provided by the flexibility of the minds of young people of South Korea and their too-much-open attitude to Western ideas and trends. On the other hand, the mass culture of South Korea sometimes helps to preserve cultural identity and takes an active part in the formation of national identity through the replication and translation of historical symbols and nationally significant ideas 1. Since ancient times Korean traditional culture was quite open to the penetration of different local cultures and religious beliefs, that was determined by ethnic consciousness and location of the Korean Peninsula. Transparency and open-mindedness of Korean culture is reflected in the specific architecture of the Korean traditional house, traditional clothes, paintings, handicrafts, etc. Since the Medieval times, two layers of traditional culture have implicitly existed on the Korean Peninsula. The first one was related to the Confucian heritage and Chinese traditions, while the second one was formed later and its appearance refers to the invention of the Korean alphabet Hangeul, that gave start to the writing tradition of Koreans and contributed to the strengthening and promotion of national identity and national spirit. Moreover, so far, as usage of Hangeul allowed to express all the nuances of thoughts and feelings of Koreans it created specific freedom of their minds, that was fully used by people of Art and Literature in the process of creation of their own ideas, styles, techniques and genres through the 19 th –first half of 20 th century.

Carolyn Kyongshin Koh Choo, Traditional Korean Ceramics: A Look by a Scientist

Seoul Journal of Korean Studies, 2017

As can be surmised from its title, this book is a comprehensive survey of traditional Korean ceramics written by a scientist. Its author, Carolyn Kyongshin Koh Choo, is a scientist who has taken an unusual career path. Trained as a physical chemist at MIT, she turned her research focus to traditional Korean ceramics in the early 1990s, establishing the Department of Science of Cultural Properties at Chung-Ang University as the institutional base for her extraordinary project to "understand the beauty of [Korean] ceramic wares from a scientific point of view" (9). The guiding motive of this book is not especially different from that of the prominent 20th-century connoisseurs of Korean ceramic arts. Like Yanagi Muneyoshi, Ko Yusȏp, and other modern art historians, Koh Choo also searches for the uniqueness of the Korean ceramic tradition by identifying its subtle differences from the grossly similar but technically more sophisticated Chinese tradition. To this common search for Korean uniqueness, she adds her own "scientific point of view." She presents the microscopic and chemical analysis of ceramic shards excavated from major kiln sites as a new way to investigate the unique technical and aesthetic characteristics of Korean ceramics. Reflecting the author's self-positioning as a scientific connoisseur of Korean ceramic art, this book takes a different approach from that of ordinary art history works. Rather than following the conventional historical succession of the main ceramic types, from Koryȏ celadon to Chosȏn white porcelain, she Book Notes