J.P. Park 2020 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award

J.P. Park has won the 2020 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, a prize given by the College Art Association in the United States to honour "an especially distinguished book in the history of art, published in the English language.”

A New Middle Kingdom: Painting and Cultural Politics in Late Chosŏn Korea (1700–1850) 

University of Washington Press, 2018

J.P. Park’s A New Middle Kingdom: Painting and Cultural Politics in Late Choson Korea (1700– 1850) marks a milestone in the scholarship of the history of Korean art and the arts of modern East Asia more generally. Challenging long-held nationalistic generalizations about late Chosŏn dynasty art, Park breaks ground by placing the new visual program of true-view landscape and genre painting in its social context, connecting it to interregional artistic and cultural dialogue between Korea and her neighbors China and Japan.  

This deeply learned, impeccably produced, lucidly written, and eminently readable book surveys Korean painting from a period of unprecedented economic prosperity, deftly positioning it within debates about national sovereignty, social order, and class identity. With a focus on changing conventions for landscape and genre painting, Park tackles topics of broad interest and significance, such as the relationship between art and “everyday” life, visual culture and literature, travel and personhood. Park makes the convincing case that painting in the late Choson dynasty has much to teach us about the history of art in China, Japan, and Europe, expanding our entrenched understanding of vectors of “influence” to illuminate the active resignification of sources, theories, and motifs in a rapidly changing world. Daring in his approach to questions of method, Park analyzes paintings for what they actively obscure as much as for what they manifestly show. By reading these images against the grain, and with diplomatic yet persuasive prose, he expands our understanding of what pictorial “evidence” may reveal, thereby opening up the study of Korean art to new audiences and offering productive avenues for cross-cultural comparison and exchange.