Courtesy The Charles B. Wang Center Stony Brook University

From American Missionaries’ Residences to Chanceries: Hybrid Korean-Western Architecture in Modern Korea and Beyond
Thursday, November 21, 2024, 2-3pm
Theater
Free Admission

Photographs taken by early American missionaries to Korea, such as Samuel Austin Moffett (1864–1939) and Edmund de Schweinitz Brunner (1889–1973), capture what life was like in Korea during the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, including people, buildings, streets, cityscapes, and rural landscapes. Focusing on in-depth research of rare images of now-vanished early modern architecture in Seoul and Pyongyang from the photography collections in the United States, this lecture by Dr. Suzie Kim will examine the beginning of hybrid Western-Korean architectural styles for missionary homes, schools, and churches. Dr. Kim will also cover diplomatic missions and relations between Korea and the United States through architectural style, and she will look at how this influence went both ways, such as in the buildings of first-generation Korean immigrants in Hawaii and the Habib House, the U.S. chancery in Seoul.

Dr. Suzie Kim is an associate professor of art history at the University of Mary Washington. Her research investigates how Constructivism and the International Style became the primary source for a multifaceted cultural phenomenon in Japan and Korea from the 1920s onward. Her wider areas of expertise include North Korean architecture and contemporary Asian art. Kim’s publications include articles on Korean artists Yoo Youngkuk and Lee Ungno, architecture built by American missionaries in modern Korea, the Government General Building of Colonial Korea, and Cambodian contemporary photography. The lecture is sponsored by the Korea Foundation.

To learn more and reserve your free tickets, click here.