This catalogue was published alongside an exhibition that explored the art and visual culture of the first two centuries of the Chosŏn period (1392–1910). One has to congratulate curator Soyoung Lee for assembling the most superb examples of early Chosŏn art from museums and private collections in the U.S., Korea, Europe and Japan, many of which were previously known only to specialists. While its emphasis was on painting and ceramics, the show also incorporated lacquer ware, Buddhist sculpture, and printed books.

The introductory essay by the recently deceased eminent historian JaHyun Kim Haboush outlines the ideological, institutional, legal, religious and cultural changes inaugurated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries which resulted in a truly revolutionary departure from the state and society of the preceding Koryŏ dynasty. She discusses the tensions between kings and their administration—a rivalry she traces back to Silla times—the extraordinary position of the censors (in the East Asian context), the role of public and private education, and, of course, the impact of the invention of the Korean alphabet. Directly related to ceramics is her remark that family rituals became a private matter (while previously administered by Buddhist priests) and elite families were “intensely occupied with acquiring and maintaining ritual wares of unblemished quality, sometimes at great expense” (p. 5). As is well-known, the invention of Han'gŭl was an important means of propagating Confucian ideology, enabling non-elite groups of society to participate in written culture. (p. 10). Elsewhere Haboush has argued that Han'gŭl also became an instrument of de-powering women, and it would thus have been interesting to get more insights into the gender aspects of the early Chosŏn social revolution (JaHyun Kim Haboush, “Gender and the Politics of Language in Chosŏn Korea,” in Benjamin Elman, John Duncan and Herman Ohms, eds., Rethinking Confucianism [Los Angeles: UCLA Asian Pacific Monograph Series, 2002]).

Soyoung Lee, in her essay on “Art and Patronage in the Early Joseon,” starts with a discussion of the Confucian elite's favorite genre of landscape painting. A small error needs to be corrected here: Prince Anp'yŏng's famous collection featured mainly Song and Yuan paintings and calligraphy (rather than Tang, p. 30). After a discussion of the most prominent patron of Buddhist art, Queen Munjŏng (pp. 33–9), she concentrates on ceramics, her major field of expertise. In her outline of the evolution of the two main types, punch'ŏng ware and porcelain, she contrasts the two poles of aesthetics in early Chosŏn ceramics, the “composed and polished” and the “informal and expressive” (p. 46), linking them to questions of state sponsorship and local/private support. The comparative illustrations in this part of the overall well-designed and well-illustrated catalogue are particularly intriguing (see pp. 42–60) and her sensitive descriptions pay equally tribute to the most elegant and the most rustic creations. Chosŏn painting and ceramic decoration are, of course, closely linked because professional painters often engaged in both. On a Kyeryongsan punch'ŏng bottle, Lee states that such “liberated, dynamic and free-style drawing [can] rarely be found in contemporary paintings in any medium, whether Korean or more broadly East Asian” (p. 51). It is, however, quite possible to see this bottle as an indicator of paintings styles that have been lost, because paintings were easily destroyed and their transmission was manipulated by conventions of collecting, whereas many ceramics derive from tombs where they were secure even in the case of war. Soyoung Lee's essay also incorporates the most recent changes in interpretation of the evolution of Chosŏn ceramics. Previous authors have made the Imjin War (Hideyoshi Invasions) solely responsible for the decline of punch'ŏng production. Lee instead emphasizes the effect of an increasing availability of porcelain and a change of taste in the seventeenth century (p. 39).

The authors of the third essay Sunpyo Hong and Chin-sung Chang set fifteenth and sixteenth century painting into the ideological framework of Mencius' idea of the Mandate of Heaven and aptly translate “Chosŏn” as “Fresh Dawn.” They reconstruct the ideological intentions behind major genres and individual works, including court projects, such as didactic prints, portraiture, and documentary paintings. This shift of paradigm, a major departure from earlier, almost exclusively formalistic treatments that saw Korean painting as dependent on Chinese influence, allows for a re-interpretation even of such a well-known work as An Kyŏn's Dream Journey to the Peach Blossom Land (p. 75). What could be further explored is how popular themes, such as the Eight Views of Xiao and Xiang, reflect the wish to retreat from an often turbulent political situation (the authors briefly mention the purges of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century on p. 79). Hong and Chang also thoroughly discuss for the first time in English the various facets of a sixteenth century mode, known as the Korean Zhe school. They highlight the diversity Kim Si's landscapes and thus give us an idea of the independence and individuality of its most representative scholar painter (for further discussion of Kim Si, see Burglind Jungmann, Die koreanische Landschaftsmalerei und die chinesische Che-Schule [Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag 1992]).

Art of the Korean Renaissance presents a truly novel approach to Korean art history and casts new light on an era which has hardly been explored—mostly because of the prejudice that little relevant artwork survived the disasters of the Imjin War and the Manchu Invasions. The exhibition has proven otherwise: there may be little material, but it is undoubtedly superb and diverse, and the catalogue presents it most splendidly.