Marvelous Wonders and Surprising Delights: “Strange Things from the West” and Late Joseon Painting

This talk explores how public knowledge of Western things such as the telescope and the camera obscura took shape in late Joseon Korea and how it was used in painting.

Korean envoys to Beijing were key players in introducing and circulating Western curiosities and novelties. They brought numerous books on Europe and some of the Western scientific instruments to Korea and laid the foundation for the rise of Western learning. Telescopes, self-sounding clocks, world maps, and books on European geometry such as Matteo Ricci’s (1552-1610) Jihe yuanben (Elements of Geometry) of 1607 opened up an exciting period of time during which the impact of Western learning on the minds of Korean scholars was profound. This talk will examine the textual records of Western scientific devices and visual materials in order to see how public discourse on the West was formulated. This analysis will illuminate whether Western things played an important role in shaping the visual culture of transnational interaction in late Joseon Korea.

Chin-Sung Chang is Associate Professor in the Department of Archaeology and Art History at Seoul National University. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in Art History from Seoul National University, an MA from Columbia, and a Ph.D. in Chinese Art History from Yale. He has co-authored Landscapes Clear and Radiant: The Art of Wang Hui (1632-1717) and Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600. He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has been working on monographs on the Chinese literati painter Ni Zan (1301-1374), one of the “Great Masters of the Late Yuan,” and the eminent Korean court painter Kim Hongdo (1745-after 1806).