Art Talk Live: Eyeglasses and Other Luxuries in a Late Chosŏn Screen Painting

On Tuesday, Nov. 15, former fellow Yuhua Ding will explore early 20th-century Korean paintings in a virtual talk. The paintings in focus include distinctly modern items and this talk will discuss how those objects relate to knowledge and self-fashioning. Yuhua is a Kemper Assistant Curator of Collections and Academic Affairs at Wellesley College's Davis Museum and a former Gregory and Maria Henderson Curatorial Fellow in East Asian Art at the Harvard Art Museums.

Ch’aekkŏri is a unique Korean genre of still-life painting composed of assemblages of thread-bound books, antique vessels, writing implements, flowers, fruit and other luxury items connoting refinement and auspiciousness. The presence in these paintings of eyeglasses imported from Qing dynasty China suggests an important shift in collecting tastes toward the new and unconventional. It also signals a new mode of self-expression among Korean scholars of the late Chosŏn dynasty, as Korea was taking its first steps into the modern world.

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