Old and New in Korean Art

The current installation looks at the dynamic tension between tradition and innovation in Korean art and this tension’s transformative impacts. The selected paintings illustrate how Korean artists in the early 1900s built on and broke with tradition through new artistic languages and interpretations. Tiger Family (호랑이 가족도), for example, demonstrates how its painter strove to achieve greater realism in traditional subjects in the wake of a growing influx of foreign cultural products and commodities toward the second half of the 1800s. Meanwhile, the understated elegance of traditional Korean ceramic works served as a source of artistic creativity for many contemporary Korean artists to explore the language of abstraction.