Join former fellow Yuhua Ding as she explores early 20th-century Korean paintings that include distinctly modern items and how those objects relate to knowledge and self-fashioning. Ch’aekkŏri is a unique Korean genre of still-life painting composed of assemblages of thread-bound books, antique vessels, writing implements, flowers, fruit, and other luxury items connoting refinement and auspiciousness.

The presence in these paintings of eyeglasses imported from Qing dynasty China suggests an important shift in collecting tastes toward the new and unconventional. It also signals a new mode of self-expression among Korean scholars of the late Chosŏn dynasty, as Korea was taking its first steps into the modern world.