Arts of Korea

Korean art is the least-known East Asian tradition. Much was destroyed in invasions and wars, and then there are current geopolitical realities. So the dedication of a permanent Korean gallery at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1998 and the museum's cooperating with the National Museum in Seoul on an opening exhibition were benchmarks. Absent an available art-historical survey, this catalog is surely the most up-to-date and informative overview in English. The 100 objects exhibited cover roughly 2,400 years, and with 21 national treasures and other objects that probably would be so designated if not in collections abroad, they give tantalizing tastes of Korea's ceramics--including celadons of pure green or with colored inlays, stonewares decorated with white slip, and ice-white porcelains--Buddhist sculpture, religious and secular painting, and metalwork and applied arts.

The works are divided by medium, and seven essays by eminent Korean art scholars provide chronicles of ceramics, Buddhist sculpture, landscape painting, "true-view" paintings of Korea, and overviews of works in the Metropolitan's collection and the peninsula's history. The essays, excellent object-specific descriptions, 148 color plates of works exhibited, and 200 illustrations of other crucial material enable the reader to piece together the mosaic of Korea's major artistic developments.

For anyone who wants to delve into Korean art or better understand the artistic relations between China and Korea or Korea and Japan--the latter an important story now beginning to be told--this impressive and weighty tome (511 pages with a 24-page index) will remain an important reference. --Joseph Newland