Through old wooden boxes, Kansong Museum of Art explores the strange, wild rides its treasures have taken

Most museums leave the boxes their paintings are kept in to the conservators, but at the Kansong Art Museum in Seoul, the boxes are now the exhibition itself.

“Sangseo: Reading the Collection,” which opened Wednesday at the museum’s Bohwagak building in Seongbuk District, central Seoul, is the first time the museum has shown at scale the paulownia boxes that have held its paintings and calligraphy for nearly a century, along with the inscriptions brushed in ink on their lids.

These inscriptions, known as sangseo, were written by the leading connoisseurs of the 1930s, who kept close records of what a work was called, what it was made of, who had owned it and how it entered the collection.

Around 1820, the calligrapher Kim Chong-hui, better known as Chusa, wrote a couplet of his own verse for Gu Chun, a famous Qing dynasty official who had been dismissed for telling the emperor what he did not want to hear.

A century later, that couplet turned up in a Beijing market. There it was found by Park Seok-yun — a pro-Japanese official in the puppet state of Manchukuo and the brother-in-law of the famed writer and historian Choe Nam-seon — who was in the Chinese city for medical treatment. It eventually came into the possession of Chun Hyung-pil, the founder of the Kansong Art Museum, with calligrapher, connoisseur and independence activist Oh Se-chang, Chun’s mentor, writing on the box in 1939, “Truly a strange fate.”

“Only people close to Park could have known any of this,” said Kim Young-wook, the museum’s head curator, during a press conference on Tuesday. “Because that whole story and all that information were written on the box, we now know the route by which the work came in.”

Chun, better known by his pen name Kansong, was born in 1906 into one of Seoul’s wealthiest families. He inherited the family fortune at 24, right after earning a law degree at Waseda University in Tokyo. Under Oh's guidance, he spent much of the fortune at auctions and through brokers on Korean art that would otherwise have flowed to Japan during the 1910-45 colonial period.

For the Hunminjeongeum Haerye, the 15th-century manual explaining the principles of the Korean alphabet, Chun paid 10 times the asking price.

In 1938, he opened Bohwagak — the “House of Brilliant Treasures,” a name chosen by Oh. It was Korea’s first private museum.

That venue, now the Kansong Art Museum, remains the oldest of the country’s three major private museums, alongside the Leeum and Horim.

This year marks the 120th anniversary of Chun’s birth, and the “Sangseo: Reading the Collection” exhibition closes a three-year series — begun when Bohwagak reopened after renovations in 2024 — on how the collection came together.

The custom of writing inscriptions on boxes itself is Japanese, according to curator Kim. It began in Japan's Muromachi period (1336–1573), when connoisseurs judged imported Chinese tea wares. The practice arrived in Seoul with Japanese antique dealers in the 1910s, when an inscription worked on the market as a kind of certification.

Chun kept that Japanese form but had the boxes written only by the most exacting authorities he knew. From 1934, he also had craftsmen build a box to fit each work, at 20 to 200 won apiece — the price of dozens of sacks of rice at the time.

Of about 700 surviving boxes in Chun’s collection, 258 carry inscriptions, most by his mentor Oh and the painters Lee Do-young and Lee Han-bok. About 20 are by Uzan Nagao, a Japanese calligrapher and scholar of Chinese classics.

The inscribed boxes did not necessarily hold the most valuable masterpieces.

“Rather than masterpieces, many are works with a more unusual history of how they were acquired and handed down,” Kim said.

When the collector Kim Jae-su put his holdings up for sale in the late 1930s, Chun immediately sent a broker after a gold-on-black-silk landscape by the 17th-century painter Yi Jing. The year before, Chun had bought a painting of the same format and size.

Oh’s contributions to the boxes and inscriptions could also be read as personal. On a box for Joseon-era painter Kim Hong-do’s (1745-1806) “Stealing a Peach from Nangwon Garden,” Oh wrote in 1934 that it was “a masterpiece of figure painting, a fine work rarely seen of late,” and noted that he had written the note by a window in the rain. On another, for a Chusa couplet, he asked Chun to laugh it off if his commentary went on too long, noting this on the box as well.

Chun In-keon, the museum’s director and the founder’s grandson, compared the boxes to a car’s bumper, which breaks so the people inside do not. Many are cracked, but the works inside are intact.

“What matters when we look at a painting or calligraphy is the story tangled up in it,” Chun said. “The sangseo is what gives that behind-the-scenes story more depth and grounding.”

At the gate of Kansong Art Museum, a pair of Joseon stone tigers, which Chun himself bought at a 1935 auction for a huge sum, have recently replaced the Chinese stone lions that guarded Bohwagak’s door for some 90 years. Visitors have already likened them to Duffy, the tiger from Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters” (2025).

“Sangseo: Reading the Collection” runs through Dec. 6. The Kansong Art Museum is closed every Monday, and admission is accepted only through NOL tickets priced at 5,000 won ($3.70).

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]