Collecting the Arts of Goryeo

• In Event: 286. Collecting and Imagining "Asia": Collectors, Museums, and Scholarship

Abstract

This paper traces the early collecting of artefacts from the Korean peninsula and explores changing understandings of Korea’s past vis-à-vis its present around the turn of the twentieth century. It was not until the closing decades of the nineteenth century that Korea’s cultural heritage was introduced to the world outside East Asia. By then the cultural traditions of China and Japan were already well-known and several museums in the West were actively collecting arts from those regions. In contrast, when Korea opened its ports to Japan in 1876 and in the 1880s to the Unites States, United Kingdom, Germany and other European nations, few knew anything about the so-called ‘Hermit Kingdom’. However, this soon changed as the arrival of diplomats, traders, among others, coincided with the rise of the local arts market that catered to the increased want for local antiques and other objects. Of particular interest here is the extent to which early acquisitions of Korean artefacts manifest biased historiographies of the peninsula. Writings by Japanese and Westerners indicate that whereas the Joseon kingdom (AD 1392-1910) was largely projected as a cultural backwater with little to offer for the serious collector, the preceding kingdom of Goryeo (AD 918-1392) was singled out as a cultural heyday. This view conformed well with Japanese colonial framings of the peninsula, but how did it shape the arts market within and outside Korea? More broadly, how did it shape the identity of Korea at a time when it was under Japanese rule.

Author

• Charlotte Horlyck, SOAS, University of London