Attributed to court painters 화원 추정. Ten Symbols of Longevity 십장생도, Joseon dynasty, 19th century. National Museum of Korea, LKH4053.
Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art
March 7 – July 5, 2026
Member Preview: March 6, 10am-5pm
Member Lecture: March 6, 2-3pm (registration required)
Galleries 182-184
We are pleased to announce Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art. On view March 7 through July 5, 2026, this will be the largest Art Institute exhibition devoted to Korean art in four decades. The expansive exhibition will showcase 140 works—including modern and historical painting, ceramics, and objects made for Buddhist worship and scholarly study—22 of which are officially recognized as National Treasures or Treasures by the Korean government.
The objects in the exhibition are recognized as remarkable examples of their type and distinguished for their exceptional historic, artistic, and academic value. From a 6th-century gilt bronze Buddhist sculpture to Joseon dynasty paintings to contemporary paintings of the late 20th century, the works of art in this exhibition demonstrate the artistic legacy produced on the Korean peninsula over millennia.
Once privately held, these artworks now belong to the Korean people thanks to a single groundbreaking gift from the family of Lee Kun-Hee, late chairman of Samsung Group. In 2021 the family donated over 23,000 works to the Korean government for public audiences to study and appreciate in perpetuity. Lee Kun-Hee and his father, Lee Byung-Chull, collected exceptional and storied objects from throughout Korean history as a means of preserving and celebrating the nation’s cultural heritage.
“The Lee Kun-Hee Collection is not biased toward a specific period or genre, but evenly encompasses the essence of Korean art history from the Three Kingdoms period to the modern era,” said Yeonsoo Chee, Korea Foundation associate curator of Korean art at the Art Institute of Chicago. “By encountering the depth and diversity of Korean art across millennia, visitors will experience the accumulated cultural richness and artistic creativity that have evolved into the dynamism of Korean art and culture today,” she said.
The exhibition charts the ideas, values, and traditions that have shaped the country’s creative production, from the Three Kingdoms period (57 BCE–676 CE) through the 1900s, offering insights into these objects’ rich meanings across centuries.
Korean National Treasures: 2,000 Years of Art is curated by Yeonsoo Chee, Korea Foundation Associate Curator of Korean art at the Art Institute of Chicago.
This exhibition, drawn from the National Bequest of Lee Kun-Hee’s Collection, is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art, the National Museum of Korea, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.
To learn more about the exhibition, click here.
EXHIBITION CLOSING SOON
Oda Kazuma 織田一麿 (Japanese, 1882–1956), Catching Whitebait at Nakaumi, Izumo (Izumo Nakaumi Shirauo tori), 1924, color woodblock print; oban 24.5 × 36.2 cm (9 5/8 × 14 1/4 in.). Bruce Goff Archive, gift of Shin’enkan, Inc., 1990.607.223
Japanese Prints from the Collection of Bruce Goff
January 7 – April 6, 2026
Gallery 107
American modernist architect Bruce Goff had great admiration for Japanese art and architecture.
When he was just 14, he made a drawing entitled “A Japanese Residence” (1918), and several early watercolors from the 1920s depict Asian scenes. Goff deeply engaged with Japanese art and culture throughout his life, collecting prints alongside his patron Joe Price, and finally visiting the country in 1969.
Many of the prints in his collection date to the 1930s and 40s and feature the nostalgic and seasonal landscapes created by artists of the Shin-hanga movement. These works are characterized by a careful attention to light and weather effects and a painterly realism not present in earlier Japanese prints. Artists Kawase Hasui (1883-1957) and Yoshida Hiroshi (1867–1950) were the main proponents of this style and incredibly prolific. Hasui created over 600 print designs in his lifetime, and because Goff was interested in “making a collection of the work of Hasui,” he collected about 400 individual designs by the artist.
In addition to displaying prints in his home, Goff showed them as inspiration to students at the University of Oklahoma when he led the architecture school there. Goff’s interest in and knowledge of Japanese art and culture can be seen in two of his most celebrated built projects: Shin’enKan (1956–76), Etsuko and Joe Price’s home in Bartlesville, Oklahoma where they displayed their renowned collection of Japanese paintings and the Pavilion for Japanese Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1978-1988).
This exhibition brings together 35 of the more than 800 Japanese prints that were given to the museum from Goff’s estate in 1990. Illuminating one of Goff’s many influences and inspirations, it complements the retrospective Bruce Goff: Material Worlds, on view in the Art Institute’s Regenstein Hall, December 20, 2025–March 29, 2026.
To learn more, click here.
Tuan Andrew Nguyen: We Were Lost in Our Country
September 5 – March 8, 2026
Gallery 283
For the Ngurrara people of Western Australia, Country is not just a place.
The word also signifies kinship with the lands, waters, and skies of the Great Sandy Desert, which the Aboriginal communities of the Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, Mangala, and Juwaliny language groups have stewarded for millennia. Tuan Andrew Nguyen’s film We Were Lost in Our Country explores how these communities established legal rights to their ancestral land by creating the monumental painting Ngurrara Canvas II in 1997.
Painted entirely from memory and intergenerational knowledge, Ngurrara Canvas II maps the environmental features of 29,000 square miles of the Great Sandy Desert. Created by 44 Ngurrara artists, it is more than a cartographic representation of territory. It was conceived and produced as evidence of Indigenous connections to Country, securing the land—and the spiritual worldview it embodies—for future generations.
Nguyen’s film brings together archival and new footage, including interviews with surviving map artists and younger community members who were raised outside of the desert, disconnected from Country. It meditates on dispossession and inherited trauma, as well as on ways of knowing and belonging. In We Were Lost in Our Country, Nguyen shows how collective memory heals and engenders solidarity and how storytelling and art making are forms of political resistance.
To learn more, click here.
Jitish Kallat: Public Notice 3
September 9, 2024 – May 17, 2026
Jitish Kallat’s site-specific installation, Public Notice 3, returns to the Art Institute of Chicago’s Grand Staircase this fall after a 14-year hiatus.
Initially unveiled on September 11, 2010, the work connects two significant historical events separated by 108 years: the First World Parliament of Religions which began on September 11, 1893, and the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. At the earlier event, the World Parliament of Religions, held in what is now the museum’s Fullerton Hall, a young Hindu monk, Swami Vivekananda electrified audiences with a powerful speech calling for an end to religious fundamentalism, intolerance, and bigotry.
This very speech forms the basis of Kallat’s work, as the staircase risers are illuminated by Vivekananda’s words in five alternating colors—red, orange, yellow, blue, and green. These colors, borrowed from the decade-long advisory system of the US Department of Homeland Security following the attacks of 9/11, formed a spectrum denoting terrorism threat levels—from red for severe to green for low. Kallat transforms this motif of public vigilance into a radiant signal, reflecting Swami Vivekananda’s timeless and urgent plea for tolerance and universal acceptance.
To learn more, click here.
Raqib Shaw: Paradise Lost
June 7, 2025 – November 15, 2026
Gallery 141–142
Epic and intricate, monumental and meticulous—the paintings of Kashmir-raised, London-based artist Raqib Shaw offer fantastical meditations on identity, transformation, and the redemptive power of beauty.
Shaw debuts his more-than 100-feet-wide, 21-panel Paradise Lost (2009–25), the artist’s most ambitious and personal project to date. This magnificent allegorical painting takes viewers on a spellbinding journey, from the nocturnal solitude of the artist’s childhood in Kashmir to the frenzied daylight of the art world and the West to finally a fragile, renewed dawn. Each panel is dense with symbolism: mythical beasts, anthropomorphic hybrids, collapsing kingdoms, and natural beauty in various states of transformation. Throughout, the work is dotted with images of the artist, sometimes as a humanoid creature with different animal heads, at another time as a monkey looking with awe at the gleaming edifices and the wealth of the West, and sometimes unambiguously in full human form seated on a bed of saffron under a blossoming cherry tree, lost deep in his thoughts.
The work is not a direct retelling of Milton’s 17th-century poem Paradise Lost, but rather a reflection on the many paradises lost across a lifetime: childhood innocence, creative freedom, mental tranquility, cultural belonging. “This is not just my story,” Shaw explained. “It is the story of each of us, and the story of our times.”
To learn more, click here.
GALLERY COLLECTION DISPLAY
Plum Vase (Maebyeong) with Clouds, Cranes, and Children Motifs, Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), late 12th century, stoneware with red and white slip and celadon glaze, h: 13 1/8 in. (33.5 cm); Gift of Mr. Russell Tyson
New Gallery for the Arts of Korea
Ongoing
Gallery 130
This fall, we unveiled a newly imagined and installed gallery for the arts of Korea—our first space fully dedicated to this cultural region.
The new installation presents a wider range of objects than previous displays—extending from ceramics to textiles and painting and spanning 2,000 years from the Three Kingdoms period (about 57 BCE–676 CE) until today. Intentionally located between the Chinese and Japanese art galleries, the thoughtful display offers insight into how these artworks both reflect the religious and material culture of Korea and how they relate to the arts of Korea’s influential neighbors, China and Japan.
Six themes introduce Korea’s long and rich history as well as its religious, political, and material cultures. The first section introduces objects that were made to help understand and spread the teachings of the Buddha. The centerpiece, an 18th-century Buddha statue, is on view for the first time since its acquisition after extensive conservation treatment. A section devoted to celadon and tea culture provides a glimpse into the practice of tea ceremonies during the Goryeo dynasty (918–1392), and objects grouped around the idea of symbolism illustrate how beautiful embellishments represent desired outcomes, such as a blissful marriage, career advancement, and long life.
The remaining three sections focus on how material culture responded to a major ideological, political, and cultural shift during the Joseon dynasty (1392–1897) as evidenced in the creation of the earthy grey stoneware known as buncheong, elegant white porcelain, and scholars’ objects. The new installation also includes select contemporary works that meaningfully engage with traditional forms and materials.
To mark the gallery’s opening, the space presents two stunning gold objects—a crown and pendant as well as a belt from the Silla kingdom period (about 57 BCE–676 CE). These objects have been designated as Treasures by the Cultural Heritage Administration of Korea and are on loan from the National Museum of Korea through early February 2025. Further enhancing the visitor experience are an interactive feature and video that offer deeper insight into two objects’ symbolism and function.
To learn more, click here.
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