A glowing 18th century moon jar, Kim Whanki’s enveloping blue dot painting of 1973 and a nearly 700-year-old indigo sutra transcribed in gold are some of the most exquisite items on view in “Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art,” a traveling show currently at the Art Institute of Chicago — but they are not the most fascinating. That distinction goes to obscured aspects of the exhibition that touch on South Korean tax law and chaebol, the handful of family-owned business conglomerates that have dominated the country’s economy since the 1960s.
The largest and most successful chaebol of all is Samsung Group. In 2024, it accounted for approximately 23% of South Korea’s GDP. When Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee died in 2020, his family was hit with a colossal inheritance tax bill, which they offset by gifting 23,000 artworks from his personal collection to two state-run museums. This was new. The family had never before donated their art or even revealed such a large part of it to the public. In South Korea, unlike in the United States, donated artworks are not tax-deductible; instead, inheritors simply avoid being taxed on the value of the donated artworks. Donation was therefore not the most lucrative use of those assets, though it was certainly the most magnanimous. (Through a company spokesperson, Samsung has denied that the donation was related to the tax payments.)
At the time the bequest was announced, Lee Kun-hee’s only son and corporate heir was in prison for bribery and other crimes; some have speculated that the donation created a favorable atmosphere for his eventual presidential pardon. More recently, he has been acquitted of other legal woes. Such scandals have plagued the Lee family before. Lee Kun-hee was himself twice convicted on corruption charges and pardoned both times.
Extraordinary wealth and power made it possible for Lee Kun-hee and his father, Lee Byung-chull, the founder of Samsung, to amass the single most comprehensive private holdings of Korean art in the world. Among its jewels are 14 “National Treasures” and 46 “Treasures,” the two highest state cultural heritage designations. According to their own writings, the Lees built the collection based on principles of national identity and global competitiveness, but it primarily tells a story about the tastes and needs of the moneyed elite, from the royal courts of past dynasties to the billionaire CEOs of today. Folk art is not represented. Intriguingly, the 140 selections on view, ranging from vases to books, Buddhist figurines to landscape painting, literati desk accessories to official portraiture, look nothing at all like the art favored by European aristocrats arrayed elsewhere in the Art Institute. The Korean nobility of bygone eras simply had better taste.
A millennium of ceramics bears this out. Forget the gilded curlicues and tacky painted scenes that decorate the fanciest French and Viennese servingware — they’ve got nothing on the elegant gray-green celadon tea cups and ewers favored by the Goryeo dynasty, who reigned from 918 to 1392 and from whose name “Korea” derives. The ensuing rulers, the Joseon monarchy, did their predecessors one better. They at first preferred buncheong, a rustic style of stoneware decorated with white slip, gorgeously epitomized by a late 15th-century bowl marked by wide sweeps of pale brushwork on its interior and exterior, nothing more. Even simpler was the milky white porcelain that eventually became the primary production of the Joseon’s official kilns, its austerity felt to be more in keeping with the virtues of Confucianism. Four deep bowls of this type look strikingly minimalistic. Others present a variety of designs in cobalt blue, an imported pigment so pricey it was originally limited to royal usage only.
Dragons, representing sacred authority, were a motif also reserved just for the ruling classes. But mostly it was materials that were restricted, including red pigment from mercury and deep green hues extracted from copper mines. A 12½-foot folding screen richly painted in these colors astounds. Fabricated by unnamed court painters in the 19th century, it features a highly stylized, super-flat landscape teeming with the 10 symbols of longevity, among them mountains, clouds, deer, cranes and odd little mushrooms called lingzhi. Such screens would have stood in a palace hall, behind the main seat in a room, or in a courtyard as a backdrop for a ceremonial event.
Beyond fashioning stunning décor, Joseon court painters were tasked with recording major events. Small, detailed images, later compiled into albums, portray scenes like a banquet held in 1741 by King Yeongjo to celebrate his study of an important text. Seen from a bird’s eye view in a terrifically planar and patterned style, it itemizes the individual round black tables of food and drink placed before each of 13 seated officials, but obeys the convention of not representing the king or crown prince in the flesh. It is a must-see for anyone interested in geometricization.
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Gatherings might also be memorialized in large ink paintings that set the meeting in a picturesque landscape, captioned with the name of the event and a list of the titled participants; a rare set from the late 16th century is here, having survived the Japanese and Qing invasions of the following decades. Attendees would have received copies to deepen the bonds created by the affair, not unlike how people today cherish photographs of their encounters with celebrities and politicians.
Also on exhibit are extraordinary selections of Buddhist materials, including devotional statues, ritual tools, illustrations from the life of the Buddha, and rare sutras. The Goryeo were devout Buddhists; so too are the Lee family, of the modern Won Buddhist sect. Very few sacred paintings from the Goryeo period remain, and the majority are today held in Japan, Europe and the U.S., displaced by wars and changing dynastic priorities. The Lees’ acquisitions mark an impressive feat, both in terms of reclaiming national heritage and asserting personal piety. The Joseon were predominantly Confucian, but they too promoted Buddhism, notably by disseminating scriptures in Hangeul, the Korean alphabet invented in 1443. A 16th century woodblock reprint of the first Buddhist text ever published in Hangul is on display.
“Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art” also includes magnificent examples drawn from 500 years of Joseon-era amateur ink painting. “Amateur” here means not being created in fulfillment of government, royal or religious commissions — essentially painting for pleasure, including by the elite themselves, like Yi Haeung, father of King Gojong and composer of a gorgeously spare and cropped 1887 picture of orchids and a scholar’s rock.
Amateur landscapes abound, from the mythic to the real, my personal favorite being a hybrid Yun Jehong created in his representation of Gudambong Peak, a sightseeing destination easily accessed from the capital by boat. In reality, there is only one peak; in Yun’s depiction, five impossibly craggy stone spires rise out of the Namhangang River, “like the abode of immortals,” as he writes in his inscription.
The Joseon maintained a policy of isolationism for hundreds of years, until the arrival of Western imperial powers in Asia in the 19th century forced them to open up the country. Then came the brutal Japanese annexation that lasted from 1910 to 1945. Everything changed under these conditions, including art, suddenly exposed to the influence of foreign styles, techniques, and materials. Paintings from this era tend to be interesting, less as exceptional works of art and more for the aesthetic evidence they give to the radical political shifts happening in Korea at the time. A few are magnificent, especially an eight-panel folding screen that illustrates — in a trompe l’oeil effect dependent on the Western methods of linear perspective and shading — a scholar’s bookcase neatly arranged with all the paraphernalia of a fashionable literati life.
“Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art” stops only twice in the U.S. before returning to Seoul via England. The Art Institute is the second sojourn; the first was in Washington, D.C., at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art. Both venues fit uncannily well, with their respective origins in the donated collections of powerfully wealthy industrialists. For so long, so much great art has been concentrated in the hands of so few, until, by virtue of death and taxes, the rest of us get a chance to enjoy them, too.
Update: This story has been changed to add a statement from Samsung.
Lori Waxman is a freelance critic.
If you go
“Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art” is on view through July 5 at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave.; artic.edu
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