The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), with generous support from the Korea Foundation, will host an international bilingual conference on Korean art history, March 16-18, 2001. The conference is intended to celebrate the growth of the Korean art field worldwide and will include scholars from Seoul National University, Columbia University, Harvard University, Heidelberg University, the Museum of Oriental Ceramics (Osaka), among others.

The opening segment will feature invited speakers discussing important individuals and institutions associated with the formation of the Korean art history field. The prime focus of the meeting, however, will be current, unpublished research on a variety of topics in Korean archaeology, art, and architecture. These areas have experienced great progress in Korea in the last five decades due to thorough research in all fields of art history, as well as excavations of major archaeological sites; however, scarcely any results of these investigations have been communicated in Western studies of East Asian art. The aim of the conference, therefore, is to encourage international discourse between Asian and Western art historians and?hrough the publication of all papers presented at the conference?o begin to fill the gap in Western studies of Korean art history and archaeology. The conference will end with a round-table discussion on future directions for work in the field. Papers, presented in English or Korean, will be translated simultaneously.

The three-day conference will address Buddhist art, ceramics, secular paintings, woodblock prints, calligraphy, the decorative arts, and other related topics.