Nature and Artifice: Korean Munbangdo Painting
Eleanor Soo-ah Hyun - Associate Curator for Korean Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Munbangdo is a Korean still-life painting genre that emerged in the 18th century and continued to be popular into the mid-20th century. The paintings reflect contemporaneous global trends of collecting, display and trade. In addition to introducing the genre, the talk will focus on the depicted naturalia, their symbolism and connections to artifice and amusement.
The lecture will also be broadcast over Zoom at this link. There will be a small reception with refreshments afterwards.
Eleanor Soo-ah Hyun is the Associate Curator for Korean Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Previously, she served as curator for the Korean Collections at the British Museum from 2015 to 2019. She is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Chicago, writing a dissertation on late imperial Joseon Korean and Qing Chinese art. In 2013-14, she was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is the recipient of numerous other fellowships.
Thinking Environment in Early Modernity is a speaker series focused on intermedial problems of conceptualizing and representing the environment, both in the Early Modern period and in transhistorical contexts.
In Fall 2023, the series will continue with a talk on Latin American shipwrecks by Dana Leibsohn (Smith College).
Thinking Environment in Early Modernity is co-sponsored by The Franke Program in Science and the Humanities, the Program in Early Modern Studies, and the Council on East Asian Studies. For more information on the series, please contact John Hoffmeyer or Taylor Yoonji Kang.
Artwork Credit: Unidentified artist, “Books and Scholars’ Possessions” (early 20th century).