Korean art at US museums mostly by known artists

The majority of Korean contemporary artworks held at major US museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York City are by artists who have already made significant inroads in the US, according to a report.

Twenty US museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Museum, hold 1,118 artworks by 235 Korean artists, most of whom have extensively shown their works in the US, a report by the state-run Korea Culture & Tourism Institute found.

Paik Nam-june, a pioneer of video art, is the Korean artist with the highest number of works in the US museums studied, at 164 pieces. Multimedia artist Yang Hae-gue came second, and photographer Kim Ki-chan third.

Most of the Korean artists whose works hang at the US museums were born in the 1930s.

Photographs made up the largest amount of Korean content at 33 percent of the total, followed by paintings, prints and multimedia works. Two-thirds of the artworks were created after 2000, the report said.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston had the largest Korean art collection with 153 objects on view. The figures for the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian came to 107 and 34, respectively.

Donations were the most common way artwork was acquired by the US museums surveyed, the report added, saying the process mainly involved private individuals rather than governments.

The report, released after an eight-month study commissioned by the Culture Ministry, is part of government efforts to find ways to raise the global profile of Korean artists by increasing their presence in museums worldwide.

The biggest obstacle is a lack of communication with museums about up-and-coming Korean artists, according to the report.

Inaccurate information about artists, like inconsistent spellings of their names in English, was another problem, it said, adding that it is not easy to persuade US museums to acquire relatively high-priced dansaekhwa, or monochrome paintings, now high in demand.