THE SOOKMYUNG WOMEN´S UNIVERSITY MUSEUM

and:
The Chung Young Yang
Embroidery Museum at
Sookmyung Women’s University

INTERNATIONAL COSTUME COMMITTEE
COMITE INTERNATIONAL DU COSTUME

COSTUME NEWS 2004:1
page 9, 10, 11

The Museum of Korean Embroidery opened its door to the public in the year 1976.
This museum has a collection of 30,000,000 curios including hand embroidered wrapping cloths and other antiquities, along with 8 masterpieces (about embroidery) which was written by Director Huh, Dong Hwa. These collections was exhibited 50 times including 40 times of show at Victoria and Albert Museums, and 10 times at Korea National Museum.
Director, Huh, Dong Hwa was dedicated himself to enhance a prestige of Korean embroidery art by way of writting publishing lecturing and exhibitions. He was awarded a prize for merits several times in recognition of his service.

Director, Huh, Dong Hwa
The Museum of Korean Embroidery
Seoul, Korea

open: from 10:00(a.m) to 04:00(p.m) holidays: Saturday and Sunday
entrance fee: free of charge.
We will be pleased to receive you with cheers.

Phone: 515-5114 / H.P : 011-264-2599
Fax: 515?5118

The Museum of Sookmyung Women's University (SMU) was opend on June 10, 1971 with a collection of 300 relics that SMU had collected and preserved. Since its opening the SMU Museum has continued to collect and manage relics of culture, art, archaeology, anthropology, and ethnology, with a priority on studying the history of Korean women's life. With the fund donated in 1995 by late Kim Kyung-ae, an alumnae of SMU,  the Museum was newly built.  The current Museum was open on May 11, 2004 with a standing exhibition of ceramics, wooden craft and sculpture, paintings and calligraphic works, costumes and ornaments which the Museum has preserved, as well as with an exhibition of donors.

Exhibition
Every year 300 items, selected among the relics preserved, are displayed throughout the year, and once a year a special exhibition is held to display the relics preserved in the Museum.

Items Preserved
The Museum preserves a variety of ceramic works, paintings and calligraphy works, wooden craft and sculpture, costumes, metalic works, ornaments and modern fine art, which have artistic and academic values.
Worthy of notice is that the Museum plays an important role in studying the history of Korean costumes, with the collection of kings' robes during the Yi Dynasty, such as King Yung's and Heungwan-gun.

Donors' Room
Sookmyung Women's College, the predecessor of SMU, was born with the fund-raising campaign of Korean royal family, which is unprecedented in Korean history. The Museum has continued to receive donations from intellectuals of Korean society who are keenly interested in the education of Korean elite women; relics and materials are continuously donated.

In honor of donors, the Museum is operating Donors' Room, and every year various exhibitions are made based on new plans.

Museum Educational Center for Youth
The Educational Center for Youth are educating youngsters to understand the culture and art of Korea through the works of the past and present.
Also, the Center aims to expand education through the training of teachers, lectures and publication of books.
Special education for youngsters is provided during the vacation; during the semesters the Center operates programs related with school curriculum.

Volunteer/Internship Program
Volunteers and Interns participate in various activities of the Museum, contributing to cultivating cultured women and professional workers.
Students of SMU will work as volunteers and scholarship students.  Students enrolled in the Graduate School will be awarded the certificates when they complete Internship Program.
Volunteers other than students will work as guides for exhibition, or take care of data room.

Convenience Facilities
Library and Data Room
Museum Shop
Restaurant, Lounge, and Parking Lot

Renaissance Plaza

The Plaza consists of Chungpa Gallery, Moon Shin Art Museum, Sculpture Park, Concert Hall and the Center for Traditional Art Performance.

Housed in a newly constructed building that includes exhibition galleries, an information center, a library, conservation studios, classrooms, and a 300-seat auditorium equipped with earphones for simultaneous translation, the Museum aims to become a leading center for scholarship in embroidery and other textile arts.

The Collection
Utilized for exhibition, teaching, and research purposes, the permanent collection of The Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum at Sookmyung Women’s University

includes votive textiles, ecclesiastical robes, military uniforms, folding screens, wedding garments, chair and table coverings, rank insignia, and various types of clothing, costume accessories, and household furnishings

used by all social classes. The collection encompasses a broad range of historical examples from around the world as well as replicas of extant ancient artifacts otherwise inaccessible for public viewing. Through public exhibitions, hands-on teaching sessions with textile historians and artists, and the facilitation of individual scholarly research, the Museum seeks to encourage the examination of embroidered textiles as primary documents of the technological, social, and cultural environments that produced them as well as to emphasize embroidery’s position as an important cultural inheritance and an expressive, dynamic, and continually evolving art form.

The Founder
Dr. Young Yang Chung was born in Korea in 1936 and has achieved worldwide recognition as an embroidery artist and textile historian. She earned a Ph.D. at New York University in 1976, with a doctoral dissertation on the History and technique of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese embroideries, and has lectured worldwide on the topic of East Asian embroidery.

Her embroideries are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum Of Art, the Smithsonian Institute, and the presidential palaces of Korea, Malaysia, and Germany, and
her numerous publications, including The Origins and Historical Development of Embroidery In China, Japan, and Korea(1976), The Art Of Oriental Embroidery(1979), and Painting With A Needle: Learning The Art Of Silk Embroidery With Young Yang Chung(2003), Silken Threads(2004), Embroidered Court Costume, And Rank Insignia Of China, Japan Korea, And Vietnam- remain standard references in this field.

Through lectures, demonstrations, writings, teaching, workshops, and exhibitions of her work, she has endeavored to foster appreciation of an art form often stigmatized as "women's work " and to challenge the notion of textiles as "minor arts".
Dr. Chung is the curator of the Museum's inaugural exhibition, which traces the origins of silk embroidery in China and its dissemination throughout East Asia, and she will remain at the Museum as a director, curator, and instructor of Embroidery technique and history.