Charlotte Horlyck, The Emergence of the Korean Art Collector and the Korean Art Market

Horlyck’s book offers a timely study of how Korean art entered the international art market and how certain categories of objects – most notably celadon ceramics from the Koryŏ kingdom (918–1392) – came to dominate both collecting practices and museum display. It addresses a familiar question for visitors to Korean galleries in the USA and the UK: why are ceramics so prominently represented? Horlyck demonstrates that this prominence is not simply a matter of aesthetic preference, but the result of specific historical, intellectual and political conditions that elevated ceramics into the most coveted and valued form of Korean ‘art’. At the centre of this transformation is the emergence of a collecting culture shaped by Western collectors, dealers and scholars whose interests intersected with existing Japanese scholarship on Korean ceramics. In the late nineteenth century Korea was relatively unknown to Western audiences, and knowledge of its artistic traditions was limited and often mediated through Japan. As Korea opened to diplomatic and commercial contact in the 1880s, foreign diplomats, missionaries and merchants gained direct access to the peninsula and began acquiring objects locally. At the same time, the discovery and looting of Koryŏ dynasty tombs released large quantities of celadon ceramics onto the market. These objects quickly became highly desirable, not only for their aesthetic qualities but also for their perceived archaeological authenticity. Their origins in tombs, rather than diminishing their value, enhanced their status as remnants of a distant and refined past.