The exhibition presents the earliest encounters between Korea/Asia and Europe, and this larger project of “looking East” established a platform for a dialogue between Korean costume historians, historians of Korean art, historians of European art, and Rubens scholars. This dialogue helped us to understand the enduring importance of Peter Paul Rubens’s Man in Korean Costume within Korea.
This exchange between scholars of multiple nationalities led to collaboration across the globe, resulting in a wonderful display of Korean and European works of art in one exhibition for the first time in the States, and much fruitful and exciting research presented at a recent symposium at the Getty. At the same time, this dialogue occasionally came with a culturally filtered reading of the exhibition-related material. The perspectives from the East and the West made sense to me; I found myself standing between people of two different cultures, helping them understand each other.
Through the exhibition, the West looks east to further grasp the history, culture, and mentalities that uniquely shaped Korea and thereby to understand why Rubens’s incredible drawing continues to pique the interest of Koreans and, more broadly, Korean Americans. Meanwhile, Korea looks west to trace its earliest encounters with Europe, albeit indirectly through the Jesuits in China, and to reconstruct its ability to captivate the eyes of Rubens, his contemporaries, and beyond. Rubens’s Man in Korean Costume is where the West meets the East, and the East meets the West.
Connect with more “Looking East, Looking West” content from Getty Voices:
Paper conservator Nancy Yocco has had this drawing in her care for 30 years and knows it intimately
Video interviews with Youngsan Kim, director of the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, and Hyun-Sook Lee, hanbok designer
A video portrait of the beautiful and generous volunteers from the Korean Cultural Center in hanbok
