KF뉴스레터-Happy to Be Involved in Korean Art

Happy to Be Involved in Korean Art

“Why Korean art?”
This is a question that over the years I have been asked on countless
occasions and which is sometimes followed by a skeptical and a follow-up query of: “Do they have any art?”
The pursuit of what is generally perceived to be an unusual career path has brought with it a mixture of s of genuine inquisitive interest, exasperating questions, and irksome interrogations from family, friends, and complete strangers.
Yet, as I write this on a rainy summer’s day in Seoul, I have reached the view that my initial involvement in Korean art was driven less by calculated career choices than by fortunate circumstances, which inadvertently came to shape my future.

My initial interest in East Asia was brought about by an attraction to the languages rather than the material culture of the region. Having undergone schooling in Denmark, where art history did not (and unfortunately still does not) form part of the secondary school curriculum, I was unaware that I could make a career out of studying “things,” shapes and colors, and instead opted to study Japanese language at the university level. Despite being offered a place at the University of Copenhagen, I decided to enroll at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, which offered a focused program with interesting courses, as well as the opportunity to spend six months in Japan during my first year of study. During my third and fourth years at SOAS, I was able to combine my Japanese-language courses with classes offered by the Department of Art and Archaeology, and this led to my first exposure to Korean art.

Taught by Professor Young-sook Pak, the courses I took in Korean art and
archaeology offered a captivating insight into a culture that, on the one hand, formed an integral part of East Asia and, on the other, seemed completely different from anything I had seen before. I was fascinated by the many apparently unanswered questions that shaped the study of Korea’s past, and which offered plenty of scope for future research. With Professor Pak’s unfaltering encouragement and supervision, in the autumn of 1993, I therefore embarked on a postgraduate degree at SOAS in Korean art and archaeology. That it was a lesser studied subject was evident not only from the small number of students who took the courses offered in Korean art, but also from the relatively small number of books on the subject, which were held at the SOAS library. Moreover, since most of the books and journals were written in the Korean language, the need to be able to read Korean became obvious immediately.

SOAS has one of the best developed Korean Studies programs in the West,
and I was fortunate to be able to study the Korean language under the expertise of professors Jaehoon Yoon and Ross King. With six contact hours a week and daily homework, the time invested in learning the language was considerable, but it soon became apparent that even a year’s diligent efforts would not be adequate to reach the linguistic level crucial for postgraduate research. I was fortunate, therefore, to receive a grant from the Korea Foundation in 1995, which enabled me to enroll at Seoul National University’s Language Institute, where I spent ten months learning Korean. My subsequent PhD. research on Korea bronze mirrors, as well as my fieldwork in Korea, was also funded by the Korea Foundation. In its support of young scholars, the Korea Foundation has been absolutely vital to the continuous development of the field of Korean Studies, and I hope that the Foundation will keep viewing this as an important part of its work.

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Happy to Be Involved in Korean Art

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