J.P. Park is June and Simon Li Associate Professor in the History of Art at the University of Oxford. His most recent books include A New Middle Kingdom: Painting and Cultural Politics in Late Chosǒn Korea (1700–1850) in 2018 and Art by the Book: Painting Manuals and the Leisure Life in Late Ming China in 2012, both published by the University of Washington Press.

Burglind Jungmann studied East Asian art history at the University of Heidelberg and at Seoul National University. She was Professor of Korean art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, the first such position in the United States, from 1999 to 2017. Jungmann wrote numerous articles and books on Chosŏn dynasty art, including Painters as Envoys: Korean Inspiration in Eighteenth Century Japanese Nanga (Princeton University Press, 2004) and Pathways to Korean Culture: Paintings of the Joseon Dynasty (Reaktion Books, 2014). Along with being editor, she is a contributor to this volume.

Juhyung Rhi is Professor of Art History at Seoul National University. He is foremost known as an authority on early Buddhist art of South Asia, especially of the Gandharan region, but has also written on diverse subjects of Korean Buddhist art. His publications include books in Korean such as Gandharan Art (Sakyejul, 2003), Afghanistan: A Lost Civilization (Sahoe Pyeongnon, 2004), and the editing of East Asian Pilgrims and Indian Buddhist Monuments (Sahoe Pyeongnon, 2008). He has also written a number of articles and book chapters in English on Buddhist art of South Asia and Korea.

Donald L. Baker is Professor of Korean history and civilization in the Department of Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Korean Spirituality (University of Hawaiʽi Press, 2008) as well as numerous articles and book chapters on the religious and cultural history of Korea from the seventeenth century to the present day. His research focuses on Christianity, Confucianism, traditional medicine, and the life and philosophy of Chŏng Yagyong (1762–1836).

Chin‐Sung Chang is Professor of East Asian art history at Seoul National University. He was a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow in 2005–2006 and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in 2013–2014 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is the co‐author of Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632–1717) (Yale University Press, 2008) and Korea: Highlights of the Newark Museum’s Collection (Hollym, 2016).

Insoo Cho is a Professor in the Department of Art Theory, School of Visual Arts at Korea National University. He has edited books and published numerous articles, both in English and Korean, on Korean and Chinese art, focusing on portraiture from the Chosŏn dynasty and images of Daoist immortals from the Ming dynasty. His most recent co‐authored book is Click: Asian Art (Yegyong, 2015).

Sun‐ah Choi is Associate Professor of Buddhist art in the Department of Art History at Myongji University, Korea. After receiving her PhD degree in art history from the University of Chicago in 2012, she served as a postdoctoral fellow and lecturer at Columbia University and joined Myongji University in 2013. Her research interest centers on the ways in which the ontological status of sacred images were imagined and represented. Her publications include “Zhenrong to Ruixiang: The Medieval Chinese Reception of the Mahābodhi Buddha Statue” (Art Bulletin (97) 4, 2015).

Charlotte Horlyck is Senior Lecturer of Korean art history in the Department of History of Art and Archeology at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) University of London. She has published widely on ceramics and metalwares of the Koryŏ kingdom, addressing issues of their manufacture and use, as well as the collecting of them in the early twentieth century. Her most recent book is on Korean Art from the 19th Century to the Present (Reaktion Books, 2019).

Namwon Jang is Professor of Korean and Asian ceramic history at Ewha Womans University. She has published numerous research articles on Korean ceramic history and is co‐author of New Perspectives on Early Korean Art: From Silla to Koryŏ (Harvard University Press, 2013 ) and Understanding Korean Art: From the Prehistoric through the Modern Day (Jimoondang, 2011).

Hyunsook Kang is Professor of Korean archeology in the Department of Archeology and Art History at Dongguk University, Kyŏngju. She specializes in tombs of the Three Kingdoms period, particularly those of Koguryŏ. She published Study of Koguryŏ tombs (Chininjin, 2013) and Comparative perspective on the mural tombs of Han, Wei, Jin, and Koguryŏ (Chisik sanŏpsa, 2005).

Joan Kee is Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her books include Contemporary Korean Art: Tansaekhwa and the Urgency of Method (2013) and Models of Integrity: Art and Law in Post‐Sixties America (2019). She has co‐edited volumes on scale in art for Wiley‐Blackwell and on contemporary Southeast Asian art. Kee is also a contributing editor to Artforum and serves on numerous editorial and advisory boards in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Asia, including the Asia Art Archive, and the journals Art History, Art Margins, and Oxford Art Journal.

Kyung Hyun Kim is Professor of East Asian languages and literatures and Director of the Center for Critical Korean Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the co‐editor of The Korean Popular Culture Reader (2014) and the author of Virtual Hallyu: Korean Cinema of the Global Era (2011) and The Remasculinization of Korean Cinema (2004)—all published by Duke University Press. He has also co‐produced both the restoration project of The Housemaid (dir. Kim Ki‐young, 1960) and its remake that premiered at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. He recently published a Korean‐language novel entitled In Search of Lost G.

Minku Kim is Assistant Professor of art history at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Previously he taught at the University of Minnesota and was an Andrew W. Mellon Scholar in the Humanities at Stanford University. He earned his PhD degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, and focuses in his research on Buddhism and the cult of images in medieval China. He has published articles in Archives of Asian Art, Ars Orientalis, Misulsa nondan, and Pulgyo hakpo. Recently, he curated an exhibition of South Korean contemporary art, titled Seoul Times (2019) at Hui Gallery in Hong Kong.

Sunkyung Kim received her PhD from Duke University and specializes in Buddhist art, focusing on mortuary practices and visuality in early medieval China and Korea. She was an Andrew W. Mellon postdoctoral fellow and taught at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Her journal articles on cave sanctuaries, Buddhist steles, and sacred mountains have appeared in Asia Major, The Journal of Korean Studies, Archives of Asian Art, and Ars Orientalis.

Youn‐mi Kim is Associate Professor of Asian art history at Ewha Womans University. Prior to joining the Ewha faculty, she was Assistant Professor at Yale University (2012–2016) and Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University (2011–2012). She is the editor of New Perspectives on Early Korean Art: From Silla to Koryŏ (Harvard University Press, 2013).

Jungsil Jenny Lee received her PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles, and taught Korean art history at the Kress Foundation Department of Art History at the University of Kansas (2015–2018), California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and at several California State Universities. Her research interests include the (dis)continuity between tradition and modernism in Korean art, and the particularity and interdependency of modern/contemporary Korean art in the global context of East Asia and beyond.

Seunghye Lee holds a PhD in art history from the University of Chicago with a specialty in Chinese and Korean Buddhist art. Currently, she is a curator at Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, where she co‐curated the exhibition Exquisite and Precious: The Splendor of Korean Art in 2015 and edited its catalogue. Her annotated translation of Ko Yusŏp’s A Study of Korean pagodas: Joseon tappa ui yeon’gu was published by the Jogyeo Order of Korean Buddhism in 2017. She has published several articles on the art and practice of enshrining Buddhist relics within pagodas and statues in pre‐modern China and Korea.

Soyoung Lee is the Landon and Lavinia Clay Chief Curator at the Harvard Art Museums. Her research interests include Korean and Japanese ceramics from 1400 to 1700 and cross‐cultural exchanges in East Asia. Lee was the Curator for Korean Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2003 to 2018. Her publications include Diamond Mountains: Travel and Nostalgia in Korean Art (2018) and Korean Buncheong Ceramics from the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art (2011), both published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Young Min Moon’s art and art criticism reflect his migration across cultures and his awareness of the hybrid nature of identities forged amid the complex historical and political relationships between Asia and North America. A Guggenheim Fellow in 2014,

Moon is currently a Professor of Art at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

Yoonjung Seo is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Myongji University, Seoul. Her research interests include court painting of the Chosŏn dynasty, the Sino‐Korean relationship in the early modern period, cultural exchange between East and West, Korean garden culture, collecting, provenance research, and the cultural biography of Korean art. She has published journal articles, anthology chapters, conference papers, and catalogue essays on transcultural perspectives of Chosŏn Korea.

Unsok Song is Associate Professor in the Department of Archeology and Art History at Dongguk University, Kyŏngju. He received his doctoral degree from Seoul National University and specializes in Korean Buddhist art, focusing on image production and the monk‐sculptors of the Chosŏn period. He is the author of History of late Chosŏn Buddhist sculpture, published in 2012.

Korean pop culture has recently become an international phenomenon. Millions of fans across borders cheer for pop songs, TV shows, and films from Korea. Newspapers and journals compete to generate frenzy over Korean pop culture as academic research investigates the reasons behind the ever‐increasing popularization of cultural products from Korea. Major academic conferences on art and the humanities nowadays offer dozens of sessions on Korean art and culture. It is impressive that a country whose recent history has been marked by a series of disasters—thirty‐six years of colonization by the Japanese empire, the Korean War, and a military dictatorship that lasted into the late 1980s—has risen to command the spotlight not only in its economic standing but also in cultural production. Going from one of the world’s poorest states in the 1950s to the thirteenth largest economy in the world today, Korea remains small geographically, commanding only one percent of the area of the United States or China. Nonetheless, it has become a major player in the international culture industry and a trendsetter in producing contents and technology.

Even with all the fervor over ‘contemporary’ Korean culture, there exist serious challenges regarding the presentation and understanding of ‘traditional’ Korean culture: genuine interest in pre‐modern and modern Korean art and culture has been marginal. The neglect and lack of knowledge about Korean art and visual culture is due to the late arrival of international scholarship and public exhibitions with a focus on special aspects of Korean art. Until the turn of the millennium, with only a few exceptions, exhibitions of Korean art in the United States and Europe were conceived as general overviews of “5000 Years of Korean Art,” presenting a canon of ‘masterpieces,’ and often showing the same objects repeatedly with little variation. However, such a generic and unimaginative approach, rather than exploring the specificity of its visual culture, confirmed the age‐old prejudice that Korean art and culture was little more than a smaller (and therefore a less interesting) copy of Chinese styles and traditions. Only when more specialized exhibitions started to be held and scholarly investigations into certain aspects of Korean art were published in the early 2000s, did it become clear that the peninsula’s heritage had its own distinct history and character, and that a blind spot on the map of East Asian culture needed to be filled.

The last two such exhibitions were Arts of Korea at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (1998) and Korea: die alten Ko¨nigreiche at the Villa Hügel in Essen, Germany (1999). Rare exceptions were The Story of a Painting, A Korean Buddhist Treasure from the Mary and Jackson Burke Collection (1991) and Korean Arts of the Eighteenth Century: Splendor and Simplicity (1993), both held at the Asia Society Gallery in New York.

Although Korean studies were well established at some of the most prestigious research universities in the United States and Europe, courses on Korean art were extremely rare. Similarly, Asian art courses rarely mentioned the contribution of the peninsula. In contrast dozens of schools in the United States currently offer courses on Korean art and leading research universities have established a regular curriculum. In addition, major museums, including the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Museum of Asian Art in Cologne, have designated exhibition spaces for Korean art.

The significance of Korean art and culture is attracting increased attention across academia, but in the absence of any up‐to‐date college‐level materials on this subject, teaching and learning about Korean art remains a challenge. Of course, articles on the topic have been featured in exhibition catalogues and in short handbooks from commercial presses, and commentaries and essays by non‐professionals have appeared on websites, but few specialized research pieces have been published in peer‐reviewed journals. In our experience of teaching Korean art history, we often had to assign reading materials we would never have considered for any other art history course. Due to the dearth of Western experts in the field, most available texts on Korean art history in English are outdated, either because they do not reflect the latest research published in Korean, or because they do not answer questions of recent theoretical frameworks employed in the West. This lack of core teaching materials has been unanimously recognized as the biggest obstacle to conveying reliable update information on Korean art history outside Korea. Thus, this book will be the first professionally researched academic anthology on the history of Korean art in English, as it takes the latest Korean scholarly publications on the largest possible spectrum of Korean art and archeology into account and responds to the demands of a Western audience who sees Korean culture in the context of Asian and world history.

Furthermore, this volume can motivate instructors and scholars of Asian art history to incorporate the visual arts of Korea into their research and teaching. The geographic location of the Korean peninsula itself suggests its importance in pan‐East Asian culture. Throughout its history the peninsula has been a much‐contested region, due to its strategic geographical position. In the twentieth century it became, and still is, a battleground for superpowers. Starting with its forced opening in the late nineteenth century, the country has been frequently referred to as the ‘hermit kingdom.’ This idea is essentially wrong. It was conceived at a time when European powers, the United States, and Japan started to conquer, divide, and colonize East Asia. Within the Asian sphere the peninsula was always well‐connected. Korea was an indispensable partner in the diplomatic, economic, and cultural exchange within East Asia. Receiving inspiration from diverse cultures on the Chinese mainland throughout history and exporting its own regional techniques, styles, and aesthetic ideas to its neighbors both in China and Japan, Korea was a most important player in the cultural exchange among the three countries for centuries. Thus, understanding its art is an important asset for historians of Chinese and Japanese art. Cultural exchange will be a pivotal topic throughout the entire volume. Just as studying Korean art without reference to Chinese art would be meaningless, the study of Japanese art definitely benefits from a sound understanding of Korea’s art and culture.

This volume covers the history of visual culture of the Korean peninsula from earliest historic times to the present. Followed by an introductory historical survey discussing major political, socio‐economic, and cultural developments, this volume is divided into four parts: Ancient to Medieval Cultures on the Korean Peninsula, The Koryŏ Dynasty, The Chosŏn Dynasty, and Modern and Contemporary Developments. The essays in each part explore major aspects of the visual culture in a certain period while throwing light on the political, social, and religious contexts. In spite of the editors’ efforts to cover as many facets as possible, some themes were left out, partly for lack of extant materials and partly because little research has been done so far into important fields, which include architecture, calligraphy, and the history of print media. Research on historic sites and scholarship in North Korea are less accessible and therefore the chapters on the historic periods when the center of power was in the north, particularly during the Koryŏ dynasty, concentrate more on materials in South Korea and Japan. Despite such minor issues, this book aims to maintain theoretical and interpretive balance without falling into any regional prejudice and academic hegemony. Furthermore, contributors discuss visual and material artifacts of Korean art housed in various archives and collections around the globe. In sum, this book is the first successful collaboration among major scholars of Korean art in the Asia, North America and Europe that will enjoy a longer shelf life not only within the academic community, but also among the general public.

In the field of calligraphy, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently premiered Beyond Line: The Art of Korean Writing, the first major exhibition of Korean calligraphy in the United States (June 2019). For an important Korean contribution to print history in East Asia, see Lothar Ledderose’s Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art, published by Princeton University Press (2000).

The Wiley Blackwell Companions to Art History is a series of edited collections designed to cover the discipline of art history in all its complexities. Each volume is edited by specialists who lead a team of essayists, representing the best of leading scholarship, in mapping the state of research within the sub‐field under review, as well as pointing toward future trends and lines of enquiry.

A Companion to Korean Art aims to rebalance and expand knowledge of the art of the Korean peninsular across a broad chronological sweep and in a cross‐cultural context. The volume comprises newly commissioned essays that draw on the collections of Korean art in museums and galleries, in Korea and across the world. Supported by a introductory historical survey that sets historical, socio‐economic and cultural developments into context, the essays cover Korean art from early beginnings to contemporary developments in art and cinema.

Together, these essays combine to provide an exciting and challenging revision of our conception and understanding of Korean art that will be essential reading for students, researchers and teachers across a broad spectrum of interests.

A Companion to Korean Art is a very timely and welcome addition to the series.