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‘Out of the middle’: Asian Art Museum director sees contemporary Korean art coming into its own

Published: 28 Apr. 2026, 07:00

LIM JEONG-WON
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Dr. Lee So-young, director of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, speaks during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at Lotte Hotel in Jung District, central Seoul, on April 22. [PARK SANG-MOON]

Long before “K-culture” became a global buzzword, Dr. Lee So-young, the first Korean American director of a major art museum in the United States, was betting that Korean art could stand on its own — and now she’s proving it on a global stage.

“When I first started my career, there was no K-pop culture at this level, and the field focused on traditional art,” Lee, director of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, said during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at Lotte Hotel in Jung District, central Seoul, on Wednesday.

Lee, together with San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie, visited Seoul for two reasons: to celebrate the two cities’ 50th anniversary of sister-city ties and to promote a new exclusive retrospective on Korean abstract artist Ha Chong-hyun that will open this September at the Asian Art Museum. Before her directorship there, Lee was a curator for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Harvard Art Museums.

“At a certain point, [attention on Korean art] shifted toward contemporary art, and that shift has been significant,” Lee said, describing the development of interest outside of Korea, something she personally witnessed over her own career. “Museums increasingly turned to modern and contemporary work as dynamic artists emerged from Korea.”

Collecting patterns soon followed, and institutional conversations surrounding Korean contemporary art grew thereafter. Thus, the shape of the field itself changed, according to Lee.

That shift is the terrain Lee now works in, and the global appetite for Korean culture has moved from novelty to infrastructure, with institutions everywhere working out what to do with the attention. That is something Lee herself is pragmatic about.

The exterior of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, California, is seen in this file photo provided by the museum. [ASIAN ART MUSEUM]

“We might look to how institutions translate the popularity of K-pop into museum engagement — [they] bring people in, and once they come in, you can connect them to the art,” she said. “The more people understand the ties between pop culture and Korea's modern development, the more they can connect to earlier artistic traditions.”

The logic is a funnel, and she is not squeamish about naming it as one. But attention and engagement are not the same thing, and the harder part of the work begins after the funnel has done its job.

“We have to identify universal themes in Korean art and culture and think about how to tell those stories,” she argued. “It's not effective to present history alone. We need to tell those stories differently, especially in ways that younger audiences can engage with.”

Dr. Lee So-young, director of the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco and former curator of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, poses for a photo during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at Lotte Hotel in Jung District, central Seoul, on April 22. [PARK SANG-MOON]

The framework she inherited, and set out to change, was older than the K-pop moment. For decades, Korean art in Western institutions was treated as the middle layer between China and Japan — legible by proximity, but rarely understood on its own.

“I wanted to break the paradigm that positioned Korean art between China and Japan and instead create opportunities for people to engage with it on its own terms,” she said. “That meant moving away from broad surveys of 5,000 years of Korean art and going deeper into specific aspects. That became my curatorial approach.”

The payoff from that approach was not only academic but also translated into genuine widespread public interest.

“When you do the right storytelling and go deeper into certain aspects of culture, people truly appreciate it,” Lee said. “Many visitors said it made them want to go to Korea and experience the sites themselves.”

That same instinct — going deeper into a specific practice rather than broader into a category — shapes her programming now. The Asian Art Museum’s upcoming retrospective on Ha is a case in point. Dansaekhwa, the monochrome Korean postwar movement that has dominated international auction results and, by extension, Western curatorial attention, would have been the obvious choice, but Lee chose against it.

″Conjunction 25-29″ (2025) by Korean artist Ha Chong-hyun [ASIAN ART MUSEUM]

“While dansaekhwa has become well known, I am less interested in doing an exhibition of it because it has already been done,” she said. “What fascinates me about Ha is that when I came to know the full extent of his career, he [is] such a diverse artist and his practice is incredible.”

“Last spring in Seoul, I saw a show of his early period up to 1975, and it was revelatory,” recalled Lee. “His early works are very different and show such a range, and I thought this is an artist that deserves to be better known outside [Korea].”

Ha, although considered a master of the dansaekhwa genre, distinguished his style through utilizing various unconventional materials such as burlap, concrete and mud, often employing a labor-intensive work process. Unlike his contemporaries, Ha has also delved into media other than painting with extensive works in sculpture, installation and collage.

The vantage point matters as much as the choice of pinpointing Ha as the central figure. The Asian Art Museum sits in San Francisco, so it is neither inside the cultures it presents in Asia nor that far a distance from them, and Lee treats that as an asset.

“The museum is positioned to look at Asian and Asian diaspora culture from a global perspective, outside of Asia,” she said. “From that distance, we can better understand and communicate why Korea and Asia matter in a broader context.”

Visitors are seen outside the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, California, in this file photo provided by the museum. [ASIAN ART MUSEUM]

The diaspora frame is not incidental. It is how Lee understands the institution's mandate, and where she locates its future.

“I want the Asian Art Museum to be a true cultural destination where people can discover and deepen their relationship to all things Asia,” Lee said in mapping out a vision for the museum’s future. “It should be a leading voice in defining Asian and Asian diaspora culture.”

Returning to Seoul sharpens that ambition for Lee.

“Every time I come, I am astounded by how the city has changed,” she said. “Seoul feels like an adrenaline injection — you see the dynamism, especially in the art world with emerging artists, collectors, galleries and fairs. This reflects a broader energy across many Asian cities.”

Staying in that current of energy is part of the job of curating art and directing the way representation of Korean art must go, as Lee understands it.

“One of [the Asian Art Museum’s] ambitions is to be Asia's global voice for the Asian diaspora and to stay connected to what is happening in Asia,” Lee said. “Partnering with artists and institutions here [in Seoul] is very important for us.”

What she is proposing, in the end, is not a louder version of an existing narrative, but rather a wider one.

“The larger point is that modern abstraction and minimalism do not have one dominant narrative,” Lee said. “Through this exhibition [on Ha], people can appreciate a different and fuller story of what abstraction and minimalism can look like.”

The Asian Art Museum’s retrospective on Ha opens on Sept. 25 and runs through Jan. 25 next year.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [[email protected]]