Art Institute of Chicago opens its first-ever Korean gallery

Yeonsoo Chee likes small spaces — they focus the mind, make it harder to be distracted, she says.

Good thing, because for the last four years, Chee has been working with a space about the size of a cramped two-bedroom condo. It might be easy for a visitor to the Art institute of Chicago to overlook.

Yeonsoo Chee hopes you won’t. It’s the museum’s first gallery dedicated solely to Korean arts — works from the permanent collection (as well as some on loan), dating from from the 5th century to the present.

Chee and the museum couldn’t have picked a better time — with Seoul now a global center for contemporary art, not to mention the West’s increased fascination with Korean TV shows, music and more.

“I hope that people will actually come and see not just the contemporary, glitzy K-pop culture, but before that, (understand that) there is such a beautiful long history of Korean art and culture that they can discover,” Chee said.

You won’t want to rush through the space. A number of the objects in the gallery don’t so much dazzle, as intrigue — tempting the visitor to peer closer, perhaps at an intricately fashioned bronze case intended to carry miniature Buddhist scriptures. Look closely, and you’ll see a tiny lock fashioned into the shape of a turtle.

There are, given Korea’s proximity to China and Japan, lots of ceramic pieces, with familiar dragon and floral motifs. And while visitors will likely recognize the pale jade glaze of the Celadon pottery, they might not know that the intricate inlays are unique to Korean art, Chee said. The pottery would have been owned by the Korean royal family and wealthy Buddhist temples and often used in elaborate tea ceremonies, she said.

There’s also a Buddha statue (lacquered wood and gilt) dating from the 18th century that the museum is exhibiting for the first time, after an extensive cleaning. Buddhism spread from India, then from China to Korea in the late 4th century.

A 5th century gold crown — so delicate it looks like a well-aimed puff of breath might dislodge it from the wearer’s head — is on loan from the National Museum of Korea. It is decorated with jade ornaments shaped like cashew nuts, actually fetuses — symbols of fertility, Chee said.

“It was used before Buddhism arrived on the Korean Peninsula. So there was a little indigenous, shamanistic practices,” she said, adding that only four similar crowns in total have ever been excavated.

All of the objects on display at the Art Institute are from the south of the peninsula.

“Because excavation in North Korea is still unknown. They are not sharing the things that are excavated,” Chee said. “The fortunate thing for us is that all the ancient capitals — almost 90 percent of them — are located in the the South Korean region.”

The showstopper, a piece guaranteed to tempt the touch of tiny fingers, is contemporary Korean artist’s Chun Kwang Young’s “Aggregation 21-JUO73.”

At first glance, the giant (about six feet across) disk — bristling with thousands of tightly packed, spiky objects — looks like a drone’s-eye view of a city conceived by a madman. Look closer, and you’ll see that each object is in fact a three-dimensional triangle of folded paper, made the traditional Korean way from the inner bark of the mulberry tree, and bound with string. Each paper triangle is inscribed with Korean characters — recycled book pages. Taken as a whole, the piece represents a way for Korea’s past to connect to its present, Chee said.

Young has said that each of his aggregation works takes months to prepare, requiring “lots of labors of love,” he said in a 2015 interview for Beck & Eggeling International Art, a gallery in Dusseldorf, Germany.

Chee said the plan is to, over time, rotate other works from the institute’s approximately 300-piece collection into the gallery (there are currently about 60 on display). The vast majority of the collection is dedicated to pre-modern works, but that may change.

“We are now actively looking at contemporary works …,” Chee said. “We want to make this really important collection come alive.”