Peabody Essex Museum opening new gallery of Korean art and culture May 17, 2025
May 15, 2025 | In the PressFrom Seegreatart.art (https://www.seegreatart.art/peabody-essex-museum-opening-new-gallery-of-korean-art-and-culture-may-17-2025/)
The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, MA opens a landmark installation of the museum’s remarkable Korean collection in the Yu Kil-Chun Gallery of Korean Art and Culture. PEM is the oldest continuously operating museum in the United States and the first American institution to collect Korean art. The gallery opens on May 17, 2025, thanks to the support from the Korea Foundation and other generous funders, including the National Museum of Korea, who also support PEM’s Curator of Korean Art position. Visitors will see key works of art that reflect life in Korea from the late Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) and early 20th century — a period of cross-cultural connection and transformation — through to the present day.
These early works, often rare and one of a kind, vividly show how people lived and interacted with each other in Korea, as well as exemplify their thoughts, values and dreams. Visitors will also see how Korean artists navigated global waves of change and expressed their struggles and aspirations through resourcefulness and innovation. Resilience and creativity have been integral to Korea throughout its history, and these values continue to shape the global influence of Korean culture today.
“The Yu Kil-Chun Gallery will be an ongoing collection installation that honors PEM’s ties to Korea and will be the only gallery in the country to focus on early 19th- and 20th-century Korean art,” Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, PEM’s Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Executive Director and CEO, said. “PEM’s Curator of Korean Art, Dr. Jiyeon Kim, has conducted thorough research on our historic collection, uncovering fascinating human stories, and has made significant acquisitions of modern and contemporary Korean artworks, further enriching the collection. Through these efforts, this project not only extends and deepens the historical partnership between the museum and Korea, but also invites us to reconsider contemporary culture and the global experience through a fresh perspective.”
History of the Korean Art Collection
PEM’s Korean collection began in the late 19th century under Edward Sylvester Morse, director of the museum’s predecessor organization, the Peabody Academy of Science. During his almost 40-year tenure, Morse was determined to bring Korean culture to the United States. In addition to gifts from Korean diplomats, Morse imported more than 200 objects from Korea in 1883, forming the basis of PEM’s Korean collection. One of the most important groups of works Morse acquired is a set of ten Korean musical instruments exhibited at the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, also known as the Chicago World’s Fair.
Yu Kil-Chun (1856-1914), a member of the first Korean diplomatic delegation to the U.S. in 1883 and the first Korean international scholar in America, played a crucial consulting role in growing PEM’s collection of Korean art and culture. Yu Kil-Chun’s stay in the Salem area from 1883 to 1884 solidified an enduring friendship with Morse. Before Yu Kil-Chun departed the United States to return to Korea, he donated his personal belongings to the museum.
A few years later, Charles Goddard Weld assisted the museum with the purchase of Korean works from Gustavus Goward, a diplomat who served in Korea and other parts of the Pacific Rim. In the early 20th century, PEM purchased nearly 100 Korean pieces to add to its already significant collection.
PEM’s collection emphasizes works that reflect the prominence of Korean women artists and artisans in textiles, basketry and papier-mâché objects. It continues to grow and diversify thanks to important acquisitions, including fine mid-Joseon mother-of-pearl inlaid lacquerware, a Nectar Ritual painting from 1744 (a remarkable example of a late Joseon religious painting), an exquisite 19th-century folding screen depicting a Banquet of Queen Mother of the West and the recent acquisition of four works by Nam June Paik, including the 2001 multimedia work Ceramic Vessel and Mirror from 1998.
About the Exhibition
“PEM’s Korean Art and Culture collection is brimming with compelling stories of Korea’s early interactions with the West, as told by various voices, from the artists themselves to collectors and advisors,” Dr. Jiyeon Kim, PEM’s Curator of Korean Art, said. “Visitors will have a rare opportunity to see how Koreans lived in the 19th and early 20th centuries and understand how their lived experience helps tell a larger story of global exchange, cultural change, resilience and personal expression.”
PEM’s Yu Kil-Chun Gallery of Korean Art and Culture will feature about 100 works, including major examples from the museum’s renowned Korean textile collection, superb 19th-century paintings and the painted screen Welcoming Banquet of the Governor of Pyeongan, which depicts eight spectacular moments from lavish official celebrations. This set of paintings, originally made as one magnificent folding screen, came to PEM as eight separate panels and has been recently conserved. The installation will also feature a newly commissioned media work by the South Korean artist Yang Sookyun (born 1982) and other inspiring contemporary works by Korean and Korean American artists.
Jung Yeondoo: Building Dreams
Do you ever wonder about the people next door? Who are they and what do they dream about? Opening concurrently with PEM’s Yu Kil-Chun Gallery of Korean Art and Culture, this exhibition by artist Jung Yeondoo invites you to think more deeply about your neighbors — the strangers you might pass in an apartment elevator or on a busy street — and imagine their dreams. On view May 17, 2025 through January 25, 2026 in PEM’s Jeffrey P. Beale Gallery, Jung Yeondoo: Building Dreams highlights two of the artist’s major photographic works: Evergreen Tower (2001) and Bewitched (2001-ongoing).
After attending art school in London, Jung returned to South Korea in the early 2000s and discovered that Seoul had become a “concrete forest” of high-rise apartment complexes. Among his new neighbors, Jung observed that the comforts of urban, middle-class life had also produced a sense of anonymity and isolation. Driven by curiosity, Jung began to ask the people around him about their hopes and aspirations.
The resulting work, Evergreen Tower, opens the doors into the living rooms of 32 families in the same apartment complex in Seoul’s Gwangjin-gu district. The apartments are architecturally nearly identical in size and layout, but each family chose their own attire and personal objects – such as toys or musical instruments – to include in their portrait.
Jung’s photographs shed light on these individual families’ tastes and aspirations, revealing vibrant interior lives behind the concrete walls of the city and prompting us to reflect on our own lifestyles and choices. The original slides for Evergreen Tower were part of a 2019 gift of photography to PEM from the Joy of Giving Something (JGS) Foundation, Inc.
In Bewitched, Jung asked people whom he encountered on his travels around the world about their dreams. He created portraits of individuals as they were — a gas station attendant, an ice cream shop cashier, a working parent — and then worked collaboratively with them to create a second portrait that visually fulfilled their greatest wishes — to drive a racecar, explore the Arctic with a dogsled or be swept off to a movie set. Though the moments captured in the portraits are fleeting, these photographs act as catalysts for conversation as well as an opportunity for the participants to reflect on the heart’s unspoken desires.
The subjects that appear in Jung’s photographs are ordinary families and individuals with whom he collaborates to tell a deeper story. Whether asking people to open up their living room or share their innermost dreams, Jung uses the camera to show people as they are, but also as they wish to be seen.
