The National Museum of Asian Art planned to open “Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared” on November 8—right as the longest federal government shutdown in US history brought the Smithsonian to a standstill. Visitor services halted, publicity froze, and the museum lurched into crisis management. Yet behind locked doors, curators and art handlers—who were still allowed to work—continued quietly installing celadons, Buddhist paintings, palace screens, and modernist canvases. That the opening was delayed by only a few days feels emblematic: “Korean Treasures” is ultimately about what persists—through war, colonization, ideological division, and now even the precarities of contemporary US federal infrastructure.
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It is also a show about how a cultural canon is made, and by whom. This marks the first US presentation of masterpieces from the Lee Collection, the 23,000-work bequest assembled across seven decades by Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul, his son Lee Kun-hee, and their family. Donated to the Republic of Korea in 2021, the bequest reshaped Korea’s public museums overnight. Seen in Washington, D.C.—where Korean art remains sparsely represented—the collection reads simultaneously as an intimate family archive and as an infrastructural blueprint: evidence of how private capital, heritage politics, and global asymmetries of visibility have historically shaped the contours of Korean art.
The curators—Keith Wilson, Carol Huh, and Sunwoo Hwang—make their thesis clear from the first gallery, which introduces not a chronological survey but a thematic show centered around one core idea: “treasuring.” A 19th-century chaekgado—a painted screen of books and scholar’s objects—anchors the room, while a real bookcase modeled after it reappears in the final gallery, underscoring how the practice of collecting was responsible for bringing together all these objects. The chaekgado, a Korean cabinet of curiosities, is all about value: it contains rare books, inkstones, imported luxuries. Nearby, an 18th-century moon jar glows beside modern works like Kim Whanki’s La Lune (1954), revealing how the once-humble white storage vessel became a symbol of Korean identity in the 20th century. Rather than romanticizing connoisseurship, the show recasts collecting as a formative cultural force, shaping taste, legacy, and the very terms of Korean nationhood.
Installation view of “Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared,” 2025, at National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.
Photo Colleen Dugan/National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution
Subsequent galleries trace the value systems that undergird Korean visual history—virtue, power, devotion—without attempting an exhaustive historical survey. A preparatory draft and a finished portrait of Jo Hangjin are paired here, demonstrating the hyperrealism demanded by Confucian portraiture of the late 18th century. A reconstructed sarangbang (scholar’s study) complicates the male-centered domestic ideal, juxtaposing desk objects with Chae Yong-sin’s Portrait of an Old Woman (1932) and a 15th-century epitaph dedicated to Madame Yi. These subtle insertions acknowledge women’s historical erasure from Joseon visual culture.
Chaekgado: Scholar’s Accoutrements in a Bookcase, Joseon dynasty, 19th century.
©National Museum of Korea
The court gallery then shifts scale, surrounding viewers with brilliantly pigmented screens and ceremonial objects that encoded royal authority. A compact room for ceramics briskly surveys nearly a millennium of technical refinement, culminating in a luminous 13th-century gourd-shaped ewer with copper-red accents, one of just three vessels like it known to scholars. In the Buddhist section, the exhibition lands one of its sharpest points: the two surviving Goryeo paintings on view, long dispersed abroad, attest to a history of loss and displacement. Their acquisition and repatriation by the Lee family since the 1970s reframes collecting as an attempt to repair a fragmented heritage, an act of restitution that also consolidates private influence over national patrimony.
The exhibition hinges on Jeong Seon’s Clearing After Rain on Mount Inwang (1751), often called the “Mona Lisa of Korea.” Jeong’s landscapes are known as “true-view” paintings because they were directly based on firsthand observation of Korean terrain. In this context, the painting becomes a pivot point: once artists treat local landscape as an index of identity, the genre turns into a reservoir of cultural memory. The modern galleries pick up this thread and tighten it. Rather than presenting a survey of styles, the curators foreground the affective force of Byeon Gwansik, who returned obsessively to Mount Kumgang. His painting Guryong Waterfall (1960s)—based on sketches made before the peninsula’s division—is rendered in dry texture strokes and luminous washes that evoke recall more than sight. After the border closed, those early studies became his only access point. In Byeon’s hands, landscape becomes a site of longing, a reminder that political rupture is lived emotionally as well as geopolitically.
Jeong Seon, Clearing after Rain on Mount Inwang, Joseon dynasty, 1751.
©National Museum of Korea
The final gallery then widens the frame, offering an eclectic constellation of 20th-century works while resisting the familiar Dansaekhwa-centric narrative. Instead of monochrome austerity, the room foregrounds heterogeneity: Paik Namsoon’s modernist utopian Paradise (ca. 1936); Lee Ungno’s Crowd (1985), a calligraphic abstraction of political agitation; Park Rehyun’s fiber-and-steel Work (1971), which merges global textile traditions with Korean craft; and Park Saengkwang’s shamanic paintings, reclaiming ritual and color as modern idioms. Together, these works insist on a plural, self-determined modernity, expanding the map of Korean art modernism.
The exhibition opens a powerful framework, but its engagement with local communities feels limited. Beyond a symposium that will be held in January, “Korean Treasures” offers few points of connection with D.C.’s Korean and Korean American communities—or with the broader artist community the museum hopes to reach. Inviting Korean intangible cultural heritage masters—whose demonstrations and performances could have shown how ritual, craft, music, and dance persist as living traditions —would have added another layer to the show. The exhibition has a strong groundwork; the next step is deeper activation in a city with a substantial Korean diaspora and a vibrant art-school ecosystem.
Installation view of “Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared,” 2025, at National Museum of Asian Art, Washington, D.C.
Photo Colleen Dugan/National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution
Still, “Korean Treasures” is undeniably a watershed moment for the National Museum of Asian Art. It expands how Korean art is understood in the United States and foregrounds the labor, diplomacy, and conservation expertise required to bring such works here at all. These objects traveled far to reach Washington, D.C. Now the responsibility shifts. If the museum sustains this momentum, “Korean Treasures” won’t be a one-off—it will be the moment Korean art took root in the nation’s capital.
