[KS] Korea-centric art image searches

[Charlotte Horlyck]

Dear Dr Kevin Parks
It tends to be difficult to find images of Korean artefacts in Western image archives. Oxford Art Online has some, though you will need a login. 

Searching museum databases is a good option, but few Western museums have strong Korean collections and even fewer have Joseon paintings of banquets. For that you will need to search Korean museum collections. The National Museum of Korea has expanded its public object database, so you could try that. You will find more images in the Korean language one, than the English one. Also try Leeum Art Museum, Horim Art Museum and Koryo University Museum. 

Alternatively, if you know the collection in which the painting is kept, it may be worth contacting the museum directly and asking for a high-resolution image. 

You seem to have already tried Korean search engines such as naver.com, but with little luck? Well-known artefacts do seem to be available, but they can't all be downloaded. If you do the search in hangul you will have better results. 

I am not sure which volumes you have been reading, but lately several good publications of Joseon paintings have been published by the National Museum of Korea, Koryo University Museum and other publishers. They include good close-ups and may have what you need. 

The following may be of some use:

선시대연회도, Painting of banqeuts during the Joseon dynasty / 국립국악원 ; 서인화, 2001.

선시대기록화의세계 : 조。의。사。속. Sŏul Tʻŭkpyŏlsi : Koryŏ Taehakkyo Pangmulgwan, 2001.

Chosŏn shidae hyangyŏn-gwa ŭirye : chanch'i p'unggyŏng 
Seoul : Kungnip chungang pangmulgwan, 2009.


Best wishes
Charlotte Horlyck
Lecturer in Korean Art History
Dept of the History of Art and Archaeology
SOAS




On 3 Jan 2011, at 23:43, kevin parks wrote:

> I apologize in advance for what is likely a vague query but I am almost certain that something of this type was posted on list long ago and I know some people on this list have impressive research chops.
> 
> Many libraries and museums have databases of archived images, digitized collections of photographs or prints, maps or paintings. In some cases they are high resolution TIFFs and in some cases they are scans of images for which the copyright has expired. Others have restricted use or academic use and are noted or available in higher resolutions.
> 
> For example, a huge image archive can be found at the Library of Congress and often at large research universities. A good example of what I am looking for can be found here:
> 
> http://www.loc.gov/pictures/
> http://imageservice.cdlib.org/
> http://camio.oclc.org/
> 
> There is also Artstor which contains many images in various resolutions but almost none of them are available for download in full resolution. You can view them online in a web browser in high resolution (in their clumsy web interface) but when you attempt to download them they are saved in vastly reduced quality or cropped to the zoom setting you have set on your browser window (you can't make the window bigger). There are a small handful of very high resolution images available for download that are marked "academic" use. But there are not a lot of these in the areas I am searching. 
> 
> I am wondering if folks know some good image banks that have full resolution images available for download.
> 
> Most specifically I am interested in finding detailed high resolution images of paintings of Joseon Dynasty Banquets, portraits & maps such as one might find in the Minsokwon text Source Materials for Korean Musicology, Volume 36: Paintings of the Banquets During the Joseon Dynasty (ISBN 978-89-86252-85-9) which I own. The problem is that these images (in real life) are enormous and the book is quite small. If I wanted to zoom in to see some detail (other than the details provided) you simply would not have enough resolution. I have several other books that have such images but am not able, in many case to get the detail I require because the images are so small.
> 
> Museums & galleries, as you might guess, are worse. The following images are even smaller resolution here than they are in Artstor.
> 
> http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/126707.html?mulR=30424
> 
> http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/105996.html?mulR=5428
> 
> Does anyone know any good sites for high resolution Korea-centric images? Of course there is Flicker and Google and image.search.naver.com, etc. which I am also grepping.
> 
> Somewhat sheepishly,
> 
> Kevin Parks
> University of Virginia, Music dept.

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