Korean Art Odyssey How Korean art first entered Western museums

Installation view of Yu Kil-Chun Gallery of Korean Art and Culture at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass., which reopened in May after yearslong renovations / Courtesy of Peabody Essex Museum

DRESDEN, Germany/SALEM, Mass. — Korean culture may be everywhere today, but the path to discovering Korea’s deeper story runs through museum galleries — rooms where celadon glows like moonlight, lacquer shimmers in shadow and history whispers from vitrines.

Beyond Korea’s borders, however, these spaces have long been few and small, unevenly researched and eclipsed by the scale of Chinese and Japanese collections.

But the tide is turning. A new generation of curators is rediscovering overlooked treasures, expanding collections through strategic acquisitions and reimagining how Korean art can be seen with digital tools and approached through pop-culture touchpoints to draw in new audiences.

To understand how far Korean art has come on the global stage, one must first trace how it arrived there. The story of Korean collections in overseas museums is complex, shaped by diplomacy, colonial entanglements, scholarly pursuit and, at times, sheer serendipity. This opening chapter turns to the origins of that journey: who first collected Korean objects, how they were acquired and why they were valued — or misunderstood — at the time.

Korean house of Paul Georg von Mollendorff, one of the first foreigners to hold a high-ranking government position in the Joseon Dynasty / Courtesy of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

How it began

Paul Georg von Möllendorff, a German linguist and diplomat who served as King Gojong’s political adviser, collected and donated Korean objects to Western museums in the turn of the 20th century. Korea Times file

The story of how Korean art entered overseas museums begins in the late 19th century, in the wake of the 1882 Treaty of Peace, Amity, Commerce and Navigation, which first opened the country’s long-closed doors to the world.

Until that point, Korean artifacts were all but invisible in Western collections. By contrast, Chinese ceramics had crossed into Europe as early as the 16th century, and by the 18th century, a craze for Chinoiserie — a decorative style inspired by Chinese aesthetics — had swept across the continent. Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, too, captivated artists and collectors alike, sparking the fervor of Japonisme a century later.

Throughout much of that period, Korea remained sealed off from the world. Under the isolationist rule of Heungseon Daewongun, the regent of Joseon and father of King Gojong, the nation came to be known as the “Hermit Kingdom.” Foreign contact was tightly restricted and cultural exchange almost nonexistent. As a result, while Chinese and Japanese works flowed steadily into Western hands, Korean art remained a mystery.

Only a handful of diplomats, missionaries and travelers who reached the peninsula in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had the chance to acquire and export Korean objects, often with little grasp of their cultural meaning or historical context.

Kim Soo-jin, an art historian and research professor at Sungkyunkwan University, noted that there was no major export route for Korean art — a key reason it was left out of the dominant Western imagination of the “Orient” or “Far East.”

“It wasn’t until the late 19th century that Korea began to be recognized as a source of distinctive culture, and even then, it was mostly by chance,” Kim said.

For early Western collectors already well-acquainted with the arts of China and Japan, Korean works were often discoveries made through the suggestion of antiquities dealers rather than deliberate pursuit.

“Many of their acquisitions were made in bulk, without knowing which items were actually Korean. Only later, through research and reclassification, were some correctly identified. Even today, we still continue to find items reattributed to Korea,” Kim said.

Storefront of Yamanaka & Co. in Boston / Courtesy of Japan's National Diet Library Digital Collections

Among the most influential players in this process was Yamanaka & Co., a Japan-based antiquities firm with branches in New York, Boston, London and Paris in the early 20th century. Yamanaka played a pivotal role in introducing Korean art — often sourced during Japan’s 1910-45 colonial rule — to collectors and museums in the West.

“Collectors at the time often placed general orders, much like tourists today picking up typical souvenirs,” the historian explained. “Furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl from Gaeseong, Joseon-era blue-and-white porcelain, folk artifacts, Goryeo celadon and lacquerware were common items on these lists.”

Overall, these collecting patterns reflected not only market demand but also Korea’s turbulent modern history.

“Korea has lived through a history of loss,” Kim said. “War, colonization and national division all left deep marks and influenced how, when and why cultural objects left the country.”

While some pieces departed as diplomatic gifts or through official sales, many more were taken during the Japanese colonial period or entered international markets at a time when protections for cultural heritage were scarce or nonexistent.

The "Entdeckung Korea! — Schatze aus deutschen Musee" exhibition at GRASSI Museum Leipzig in 2012 shed light on Paul Georg von Mollendorff's early collection of Korean objects in Germany from the late 19th to early 20th century. Courtesy of GRASSI Museum Leipzig

Ethnographic interest

The earliest wave of collecting Korean objects was largely guided by ethnographic interest, or an anthropological desire to document the everyday lives and customs of what the West regarded as “other” cultures.

Among the most significant European repositories of Korean material culture today is the GRASSI Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig. Together with the Dresden Museum of Ethnology and the Volkerkundemuseum Herrnhut, it forms the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony, part of a larger museum network known as the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (SKD). Collectively, they house more than 2,700 Korean objects, making it the largest collection of its kind in Germany.

“During the height of European enthusiasm for East Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries, artistic elements from China, Japan, India, and [even] imagined or pseudo-Asian motifs were merged into an idealized and often fictionalized construct of the ‘Far East’,” SKD director Bernd Ebert told The Korea Times.

“At the Saxon court in Dresden, this fascination gave rise to a distinct cultural phenomenon: Around 1700, one of the world’s largest and most diverse collections of Asian art was assembled here.”

GRASSI Museum of Ethnology in Leipzig's online collection showing Korean artifacts given to the museum by Paul Georg von Mollendorff / Captured from GRASSI Museum

Their Korean holdings range from traditional garments and household tools to musical instruments, lacquerware and weaponry. Much of the core collection was assembled in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by diplomats, traders and German scholars working within ethnographic frameworks.

A key contributor in this early chapter was Paul Georg von Mollendorff (1847-1901), a German linguist and diplomat who served as King Gojong’s political adviser between 1882 and 1885. During his tenure in Korea, Mollendorff managed to gather a substantial number of everyday objects at the request of the Leipzig museum, aiming to portray Joseon culture through tangible, material traces of its peoples’ lives.

This legacy was revisited in 2012 with the traveling exhibition “Entdeckung Korea! — Schatze aus deutschen Musee” (“Discovery Korea! — Treasures from German Museums”), which brought together outstanding Korean artifacts from 10 German institutions, with the GRASSI Museum as one of its venues.

Among the highlights were objects collected by Mollendorff himself, pieces that had rarely, if ever, been exhibited publicly. The exhibition sparked a broader reexamination of early Korean-German connections formed through diplomacy, collecting and cross-cultural curiosity at the turn of the 20th century.

Yu Kil-Chun Gallery of Korean Art and Culture at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. / Korea Times photo by Park Han-sol

Dawn of Korean art in US

Across the Atlantic in the United States, one of the oldest and most historically significant Korean collections resides at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts. The roots of PEM’s holdings trace back to former director Edward Sylvester Morse (1838-1925), a collector of Asian art. Though he spent considerable time in Japan, his curiosity eventually reached the little-known Korea, even though he never visited the country himself.

The origins of Morse’s collection highlight just how small and interconnected the early world of Korean collecting was. In fact, it was his pivotal encounter with Mollendorff in 1883 that formed a surprising link between the emerging networks of European and American collectors.

“Morse specifically requested him to purchase certain areas [of objects] that could represent Korean culture or its material production,” Kim Ji-yeon, curator of Korean Art and Culture at PEM, told The Korea Times. “It was a way of learning what Koreans could produce and showing the American public what Korea was like.”

That same year, Morse also befriended Yu Kil-chun (1856-1914), a young intellectual who was part of Korea’s first diplomatic mission to the U.S. During his stay in Salem, Yu advised on the museum’s Asian collection and, before returning home in 1885, donated personal belongings and garments to PEM.

Together, Yu’s gifts and Mollendorff’s shipment of roughly 220 objects formed the cornerstone of the museum’s Korean collection. Many of these pieces, including a horsehair bowler hat, offer a vivid glimpse of “Joseon at the turn of the century,” Kim notes, reflecting a final phase of Joseon art shaped by both native Korean aesthetics and emerging Western influences.

The Korean art gallery at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) in Washington, D.C. / Courtesy of NMAA, Smithsonian Institution

A parallel story of acquisition unfolded in Washington, D.C.

“A similar approach can be found in the first ethnographic Korean collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art,” the PEM curator explained. In 1907, Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), the prominent industrialist and founder of the museum, purchased a trove of 80 Goryeo celadon pieces amassed by Horace Newton Allen, an American doctor and diplomat who resided in Seoul from 1884 to 1905.

That acquisition ignited Freer’s fascination with Korean ceramics, particularly celadon — a medium already popular among American collectors familiar with Chinese and Japanese wares. Many of these celadon pieces had surfaced on Korea’s open market at a time when tombs of royal and noble families were being looted.

But in the following years of Japanese colonial rule, U.S. museums increasingly relied on Japanese antique dealers rather than stationed American missionaries or travelers to acquire Korean art and ceramics.

As Kim observed, Korean works that entered U.S. collections during this period were “filtered through the eyes of the dealers” like Yamanaka & Co. Their selections naturally reflected Japanese tastes, which in turn influenced what Western audiences came to view as “representative” of Korean art. This was especially true of Goryeo celadon that was highly prized in Japan for its association with “chado,” or the tea ceremony.

It was only after the 1950-53 Korean War that U.S. interest in Korean art gradually began to move beyond these lenses. A key catalyst was “Masterpieces of Korean Art,” the first large-scale overseas exhibition devoted to the country’s artistic heritage. Organized by the National Museum of Korea in 1957, the two-year tour brought nearly 200 treasures across the Pacific, offering American audiences their first panoramic encounter with Korea’s cultural history. In the following decades, a new network of modern Korean art dealerships took up the role of further facilitating sales and acquisitions.

In the broader sweep of modern history, the recognition of Korean art in Western institutions lagged far behind that of Chinese and Japanese works. While a handful of museums had begun building collections in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, dedicated galleries and curators would not emerge until many years later.