KOREA NEW IN YORK
The Winter Olympics are being watched for many things: sporting excellence, of course, but also for headway on the US-North Korea nuclear stand-off and even tentative rapprochements between Seoul and Pyongyang.
In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is commemorating the Games with an exhibition of Korean art, much of it displayed for the first time in the United States, and which introduces an acclaimed Korean natural wonder to a new audience.
That site is Mount Kumgang, in today’s North Korea, and renowned throughout the peninsula for its beauty.
The exhibition features nearly 30 paintings depicting what are known, in English, as the Diamond Mountains. For a decade largely inaccessible, ironically as the bird flies the site is not too far from where the Olympics will open in Pyeongchang on Friday.
Spanning the 18th century to the present, the delicate ink and colors on silk, scrolls, painted screens and contemporary works evoke a magical, even mystical terrain of jagged peaks, stunning views and steep trails.
“Given the mystery around this site in North Korea I hope that that will pique people’s interest,” said Soyoung Lee, curator of the department of Asian Art at the museum and organizer of the exhibition.
“And through the art that has been created over the last 200 years or so, that people will come to also love this incredible, natural wonder.” The Diamond Mountains: Travel
and Nostalgia in Korean Art exhibition opened on Wednesday and runs until May 20.
The highlight is an early 18th century album from the National Museum of Korea by Jeong Seon who revolutionized Korean painting by breaking with conventional generic imagery and depicting native scenery.
Included are two 1920s works by Scottish artist Elizabeth Keith, then one of only a handful of foreign visitors to Korea who wrote of her stay: “I would not have missed the grandeur for all the danger... The beauty of the climb was a revelation.”
The exhibition took three years to put together and most of works are on loan from institutions in South Korea.
“The topic of the show is about travel and nostalgia,” she told AFP. “We focused on the idea of inaccessibility and nostalgia from the South Koreans’ perspective.”
Bae Kidong, director general of the National Museum of Korea, expressed hope for future overseas collaborations.
“The history and art of Korea is not well known to the Western world,” he told AFP. “Korea has a very special culture, distinctive from Japanese or Chinese.”