The Korean Imperial Household played an ongoing role in contributing to the formation of the country’s modern Japanese art collection. Purchasing many works of Japanese art, largely from exhibitions held within Korea or government-organized exhibitions within Japan, the Imperial Household served as the greatest patron of Japanese art within the Korean peninsula. Some of the works owned by the Imperial Household, particularly those that were displayed as part of Japanese art exhibitions that took place in the Imperial Household Art Museum, inside the present-day Deoksu Palace, are now owned by the National Museum of Korea, as part of what is commonly known as the Imperial Household Collection.
However, the entire truth about the Imperial Household’s art collection has, to this day, not been made fully clear. As well as those works of art that it purchased publicly in a systemic manner, the Imperial Household also acquired works of art by other means, and indeed, it is thought that works attained in these non-standard ways account for a decent proportion of its collection. Aside from those works now making up the Imperial Household Collection at the National Museum of Korea, the majority of the works of art previously owned by the Imperial Household were scattered and lost during the various transformations that took place after the end of the Second World War. Several pieces identifiable as once belonging to the collection have been discovered within Japan. In this essay, I trace the way in which two such works?Sun and Moon by Kanzan Shimomura, and Nude by Saburousuke Okada ?came to be the property of the Imperial Household.
Although the Korean Imperial Household’s Palace was located in Seoul, during the Japanese occupation the Prince Lee Un was forced to live in Tokyo, returning only occasionally to his home in Korea. Prince Lee Un’s wife Lee Bangja, born Masako Nashimoto, came from the Nashimoto-no-miya, a collateral branch of the Japanese Imperial Family. Hence, in terms both of their living arrangements and their genealogical situation, the state of the Imperial household at this time visibly instantiates its structural ties to the two nations. This paper will also use an examination of these two artworks to ask questions and make predictions about how, within this kind of situation, such works of art were stored and appreciated, as well the kind of ways in which they might have been preserved and used.
Through this kind of research, I hope to help shed light on the matter of the art making up the Imperial Household’s collection beyond those pieces that were accumulated through the standard means, in order to come to a deeper understanding of the relationship between the Imperial Household and Japanese art.