Korea Initiative

Fall 2026

Korean Art in the 20th Century: Between Empire and Experiment. Taught by the inaugural Distinguished KoRICA Adjunct, Yeon Shim Chung, this seminar traces the transformations of Korean art across a century defined by colonial occupation, national division, and rapid globalization. Moving chronologically from the 1910s through the 1990s, we examine how Korean artists navigated—and at times resisted—the competing pressures of Japanese imperialism, Cold War ideologies, and Western-dominated art markets.

The course investigates vernacular forms of modernism that emerged under constraint: the paintings of Lee Quede and Na Hye-seok, Chung Haechang's photography during the colonial period, and postwar artists who used international platforms like the Paris and São Paulo Biennales to assert Korea's place within transnational art discourse. Rather than treating Korean art as derivative or belated, we analyze it as a site where local urgencies generated distinctive artistic methods—what might be understood as Korean art's contribution to, rather than adaptation of, twentieth-century modernism.