Meekyoung Shin's ‘Eastern Deities Descended’ (2023), a sculpture made from soap. It is a new site-specific commission by Meekyoung Shin in “The Shape of Time: Korean Art After 1989” at the Philadelphia Museum. Image Credit: Elizabeth Leitzell via Philadelphia Museum of Art.
While many American art museums highlight Asian art, many mainly focus on Chinese and Japanese art. But this is now changing.
This fall, at least five Korean art exhibitions are being held in the United States. The New York Times introduced these exhibitions in an article.
Most of these exhibitions have been curated and organized by Korean or Korean-American women curators. Ongoing exhibitions include The Shape of Time: Korean Art After 1989 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Only the Young: Experimental Art in Korea, the 1960s-1970s at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and Korea in Color: A Legacy of Auspicious Images at the San Diego Museum of Art. Upcoming exhibitions include Lineages: Korean Art at the Met, opening on November 7 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and Perfectly Imperfect: Korean Buncheong Ceramics, scheduled to open at the Denver Art Museum on December 3.
Although Korean immigration to the Americas has a history of 120 years, there haven’t been many exhibitions in American art museums that specifically focus on Korean art.
The New York Times introduced the Korean art exhibitions taking place this fall while also highlighting the perspectives of Korean-American art professionals working in American art museums.
Those mentioned include Hyunsoo Woo, the deputy director for collections and exhibitions at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; Hyonjeong Kim Han, the senior curator of Asian art at the Denver Art Museum; Miyoung Lee, a trustee of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Min Jung Kim, who was appointed as the first female director at the Saint Louis Art Museum in 2021; Kyung An, an associate curator of Asian art at the Guggenheim; and Eleanor Soo-ah Hyun, curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
