Museum director says Koreans should re-learn their traditions

The compounds of the Korea Furniture Museum in Seongbuk-dong, Seoul
/ Korea Times photos by Shim Hyun-chul

By Kim Ji-soo

"Thank you so much for showing me the refined beauty of Korean culture ... This is what Chinese President Xi Jinping told me personally" after dining at the Korea Furniture Museum in July, the director Chyung Mi-sook said Monday.

"Hanok is pretty and comfortable come rain or shine. That is its value," Chyung said, adding that it's a value that's been forgotten or misunderstood.

Chyung Mi-sook, director of the Korea Furniture Museum, looks out from the court-style hanok in the Korea Furniture Museum, where President
Park Geun-hye and Chinese Xi Jinping lunched this summer.

The wet snow transformed the hanok on the museum's compound into a postcard image as this reporter interviewed Chyung for The Korea Times. She said she wanted people to visit in order to "open their minds aesthetically after experiencing our culture."

Watching the snow fall on the wooden edifice and seeing the low-lying stone walls gracefully giving way to Mt. Bukhan in the back and southern Seoul in the front, one can easily see how persuasive both the museum and Chyung are. They are so enchanting that not only heads of states like President Xi have visited, but so have Hollywood celebrities such as Brad Pitt and Amanda Seyfried, among others.

An array of Korean small individual trays on display at the Korea Furniture Museum that attest to the diversity of Korean culture.

If anyone had the authority to expand on the museum, Chyung may well be the one. After 20 years of collecting over 2,500 pieces of traditional Korean furniture and items, she opened the private museum in the prime real estate in Seongbuk-dong, northern Seoul in 2008. About 500 pieces are on exhibit in the museum on a regular basis.

Working together with the Seongbuk district office and Seoul city government, Chung now wants to lend her vision and talent to create a "cluster of traditional houses, food and clothes" in Seongbuk-dong.

This is one of the 2,500 Korean wooden furnitures collected and exhibited by
director Chyung Mi-sook of the Korea Furniture Museum.

"We are very determined to remember the heroes like King Sejong, who invented the Korean alphabet, and Admiral Yi Sun-shin, who fought during the Japanese invasion," Chyung said, because before now, "... we have forgotten how we lived, what we used and what we wore."

Chyung's museum may well serve as a role model or hub for what the cluster might look like. She has re-assembled the museum, taking units from Changgyeong Palace in Seoul during its demolition in the 1970s; from the old house of the cousin of Empress Myeongseong in Mapo and the actual residence of Empress Sunjong, and even a commoner's house. Consequently, the museum displays court, gentry and even commoner-style hanok.

A collection of small individual bookcases that can be assembled into any design according to the owner. It is on exhibit at the Korea Furniture Museum.

Chyung said she stopped the demolition of Changgyeong Palace for two hours and said sge would take some of the remains from the edifices, if they were going to tear it down. She said she did much the same in purchasing and relocating parts of the old house of the cousin of Empress Myeongseong in Mapo, the actual residence of Empress Sunjong, and a commoner's house.

Then she assembled the compounds into a serene design exhibiting the wooden furniture pieces throughout the year. She has also inserted other lifestyle items, like Korean folding screens decorated with "minwha" or the painting of the people that she believes accurately reflects the Korean lifestyle. "When you think about it, the folding screen was used in every important ritual in Korean life — in death, in marriage and in coming-of-age ceremonies," she said.

When asked whether she was ever tempted to live there rather than turn it into a museum, Chyung said her major illness in the 1980s changed her mind about how she should live the rest of her life. "I thought my life from then on was a gift, a bonus," she said.

The museum was also an answer to the questions that she received as an exchange student at Hillwood High School in Nashville, Tenn. in 1965. "I was a little girl from a war-torn country, but I was asked to present what life was like in Korea, and I remember that I showed slide images of my house, and students asked questions, particularly about the celadon and the bookshelves here," she said. "People wanted to know how Koreans live."

When asked if her privileged background allowed her to do what she does now, Chyung said she just felt it's something that she had to do. The prime real state was inherited from her father-in-law who was in the fishery business. Chyung herself is the daughter of the late foreign minister and eight-term lawmaker Chyung Il-hyeong and his wife, Lee Tae-young, who was the nation's first female lawyer. Her brother Chyung Dae-cheol was also a five-term lawmaker.

The actual price of the hanok was not too exorbitant. She said she initially paid for cleaning up the demolition areas in order to bring to the Seongbuk-dong site the hanok remnants, but the price soon went up to tens of millions of won. When asked about such costs, Chyung said, "My mother always told me three things about money: first spend on your children's education, send your children abroad if you have more money and then do something worthwhile if you still have more."

Chyung said it was up to her generation, "those of us who lived through the lost 100 years," to bring back the lost bits of Korean life. Her mention of the lost century was in reference to the interview questions as to whether much was lost during the 1910-1945 period of Japanese colonialism and during the 1950-1953 Korean War.

"I think my talents lie in serving as the glass through which people can reawaken to the refined beauty of Korean life," she said.