Sooa Im McCormick, associate curator of Korean Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, focuses on Korean art in this new virtual tour. (photo courtesy of KCCLA)

The newest online project by the Korean Cultural Center Los Angeles, “Korean Art in America at the Cleveland Museum of Art,” is now live on KCCLA’s YouTube channel. Introduced by Sooa Im McCormick, associate curator of Korean Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the episode offers an interesting introduction to Korean art while focusing on Korean artifacts at the museum.

The new episode is part of KCCLA’s virtual tour series of exhibitions and collections of Korean art in major American museums.

McCormick examines the museum’s special exhibition “Gold Needles: Embroidery Arts from Korea” and shares her favorite pieces and the interesting stories behind them.

The Cleveland Museum of Art is renowned for the quality and breadth of its collection, which includes more than 61,000 objects and spans 6,000 years of achievement in the arts. The museum’s collection of Korean art is one of the most distinguished collections outside of Korea and the museum has been actively acquiring Korean art since 1915.

The collection features a robust selection of works in a variety of media. The holdings in ceramics are especially strong and include a number of fine celadons from the Goryeo dynasty (918-1392). The painting collection contains rare Goryeo Buddhist paintings, as well as the Joseon dynasty (1392-1897) paintings such as landscapes and portraits. Its selection of folding screen paintings includes a notable 19th-century example from the genre of “scholars’ accouterments,” or chaekkori, as well as an important pair of 15th-century ink landscape screens by Yi Sumun, a Korean artist who painted in Japan. Bronze Buddhist statuary and ritual objects from the Three Kingdoms period (57 BC-AD 668) through the Goryeo dynasty attest to the sophisticated craftsmanship of these eras. The collection also has significant examples of early earthenware vessels and other archaeological materials.

McCormick joined the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2015 and is primarily responsible for the Korean art collection. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas and a Master of Arts in art history from Rutgers, the state university of New Jersey. She also completed graduate coursework in art history at Hongik University, Seoul, where she focused on Chinese and Korean art.

For more information, visit kccla.org.