The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), home to one of the world’s preeminent collections of Asian art, announced today the appointment of Seunghye Sun as associate curator of Japanese and Korean art. Sun assumes her duties at the CMA in July 2010. The addition of Sun is made possible by a spendable three-year grant of $450,000 awarded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the hiring of a curator of Japanese and Korean art.
In this role, Sun will be responsible for all aspects of the care, presentation and interpretation of the museum’s renowned holdings of Japanese and Korean art. She also will develop exhibitions and public programming, while continuing to acquire works that enrich and expand the museum’s collection.
Since 2002, Sun has served as curator at the National Museum of Korea (Seoul, 2002-2008; Gongju, 2009), where, as the first curator of Japanese art in Korea’s history, she single-handedly planned and installed the permanent galleries of Japanese art. Additionally, she was the curator and publication author for several exhibitions, including Western-style Paintings in Modern Japan, The Lure of Asia in Japanese Art and A Treasury of Joseon Period Manuscripts and Portraits from the Distinguished Families in Gongju, Korea.
“I am thrilled to welcome Seunghye Sun to the curatorial department of the Cleveland Museum of Art,” said Griffith Mann, chief curator at the museum. “Her appointment signals a new direction for scholarship in the field, one focused on the cross-cultural exchange between Japan, Korea and China, and matches her own expertise with a great strength of the collection, Edo-period Japanese art.” Sun’s scholarship has focused on a comparative research of East Asian art history, including the reception of Chinese literati painting by 17th to 19th-century Japanese and Korean painters.
