National Museum of Asian Art Names Sunwoo Huang as Curator of Korean Art and Culture

The Smithsonian‘s National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) in Washington, D.C., has named Sunwoo Hwang as its inaugural Korea Foundation Curator of Korean Art and Culture. Her position will be funded through a matching gift from the Korea Foundation and an amount from the NMAA.

“Sunwoo’s going to do a terrific job,” NMAA director Chase Robinson told ARTnews. “It’s a wonderful testimony to the quality of work that she’s done and will do, and to what she represents by way of kind of embodying that Korean-American collaboration.”

Starting this fall, Hwang will begin to oversee curatorial and cultural programming initiatives, including stewarding the museum’s growing collection of Korean objects and reinstalling the permanent gallery dedicated to the country in the Freer Gallery in 2027.

The current Korean collection at the NMAA comprises nearly 800 objects, with a focus on ceramics, especially celadon works and paintings from the Goryeo dynasty. “We’re currently working in talks with donors about receiving gifts, and hopefully with future purchases,” Hwang told ARTnews, speaking from her home in the South Korean city of Cheongju. “We could expand our Korean collection beyond ceramics into different mediums, introduce a different topic to our Korean gallery.”.

Hwang will also facilitate a major loan exhibition with the National Museum of Korea that features 200 items from the family collection of former Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee. The show is scheduled to take place in November 2025.

“We haven’t had a large loan show like this in 30 years,” Hwang said. “I think it will give our audience a rare chance to view Korean art across time, through a different range of objects.” Robinson called the show “the single most important thing to happen in the United States and North America about Korean art for a long, long time.”

Hwang, who first began at the NMAA as an intern in 2018, previously did a five-year curatorial fellowship at the museum. She has done shows for the institution such as “Sacred Dedication: A Korean Buddhist Masterpiece” (2019) and “Once Upon a Roof: Vanished Korean Architecture” (2022).

In 2009, Hwang received her masters degree from the University of Chicago. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Dongguk University in Seoul, South Korea, specializing in Buddhist wall paintings in China’s Shanxi province.

Robinson said the establishment of the Korean art and culture position will also allow the NMAA begin to think about how to help train the next generation of Korean art curators, as well as think about East Asia as a matrix between Chinese art, Japanese art and Korean art. “We can now think about East Asia, not just as a set of kind of discrete traditions, but as a cultural matrix of, of different styles, different influences, religious influences, artistic influences,” he said. “Now that we’ve got this curator, Korea then locks into place, and we can think about that matrix. So it opens up all sorts of opportunities for us that I think we couldn’t realize before.”