‘Splendor’ Opens With High Hopes : Art: A landmark exhibition of 18th-Century Korean works has LACMA officials eager to strengthen its ties to the community, woo new patrons and build its audience.

“Korean Arts of the Eighteenth Century: Splendor & Simplicity”--a landmark traveling exhibition of 125 artworks, including 17 objects designated as National Treasures by the Korean government--is spending the summer at the L.A. County Museum of Art. And like most distinguished guests who settle in for an extended period, this one, which opens today, has arrived with an agenda.

The show was organized as the centerpiece of a yearlong Festival of Korea by New York’s Asia Society in collaboration with the National Museum of Korea in Seoul--long before North Korea’s nuclear weapons program became a hot topic of international debate. Drawing largely on South Korean collections, the exhibition debuted last fall at the society’s Park Avenue galleries, then moved to the Smithsonian Institution’s Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington.

As might be expected of such a high-level national emissary, the exhibition of screens, paintings, ceramics, textiles, calligraphy and furniture has been sent on the road to increase American knowledge and appreciation of Korean culture, which has long been overshadowed by the artistic traditions of Korea’s powerful neighbors, China and Japan. But in Los Angeles the show also is viewed as an opportunity to strengthen the L.A. County Museum’s commitment to Korean art and to develop community relationships.

George Kuwayama, LACMA’s senior curator of Far Eastern art and Los Angeles coordinator of “Korean Arts,” puts it this way: “Our museum is the third largest (art museum) in the nation, after the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and the major venue for presenting exhibitions on the West Coast. . . . By geographical destiny--located as we are in the largest city on the East Coast of the Pacific Rim--we should have one of the great collections of Asian art.”

The museum has fulfilled part of its destiny by gaining important collections of Indian, Southeast Asian and Japanese art during its 29 years on Wilshire Boulevard, but its Korean holdings remain extremely modest. “Korean art is something we would like to do something about,” Kuwayama says emphatically.

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As LACMA’s largest and most comprehensive presentation of Korean art to date, the exhibition offers an opportunity to build the museum’s Korean audience and to woo patrons of Korean art. To that end, the entire 8,000-square-foot first floor of the Hammer wing is allotted to the show--about double the space available at the Asia Society and 25% more than at the Sackler.

In addition, LACMA’s education department has planned an extensive program of lectures, tours, films and community workshops, with the help of a grant from the Korea Foundation in Seoul. Events range from scholarly art talks at the museum to family activities at churches and schools in Korean American and African American neighborhoods.

Although “Korean Arts” is limited to the 18th Century (near the end of the Chosun kingdom’s 500-year reign), it surveys a particularly vital period known as a golden age, Kuwayama says. It was a time when Korea’s recovery from foreign invasions coincided with a search for cultural identity, increased creative freedom and a growth of patronage.

The exhibition tells the story of Korea’s cultural flowering in three chapters, focusing on how art was used in the courts, by the landed gentry and in religious practices.

“This segment emphasizes the legitimacy of the royal house and its mandate to rule,” Kuwayama says, strolling through galleries where court art was being installed. Artworks portraying “Ten Longevity Symbols” wish long life to the king, he notes, pointing out symbolic landscapes on large folding screens. Such paintings provided backdrops for 18th-Century rulers whose Confucian beliefs cast them as intermediaries between the cosmos and their subjects.

Prosperity encouraged appreciation for all things Korean and allowed arts patronage to spread from the courts to the private sector during the 18th Century. The second portion of the show reveals that this phenomenon introduced artful dividends, such as precisely rendered portraits, detailed genre scenes and expressive landscapes that differ sharply from the idealism that had been imported from China.

Korean ceramic artists also began to follow their own muse during the 18th Century. “In contrast to Japanese and Chinese ceramics, there is a naivete, directness, simplicity and spontaneous insouciance in Korean ceramics,” Kuwayama says. Imperfections of glazing and firing were accepted as happy accidents, and symmetry gave way to fascination with irregular form, he notes.

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The final gallery offers artistic manifestations of Confucianism, Buddhism and native shamanism--along with proof that prosperity furthered patronage of religious art. One corner of the room is occupied by a simulated Confucian ancestral hall containing ritual bowls that could be struck like bells to solicit the help of deceased family members.

Confucians who couldn’t afford to build a memorial to their departed relatives might substitute a painting of an ancestral hall, such as an anonymous artist’s “Painted Spirit House” scroll. Buddhists, on the other hand, could contemplate the salvation they might find during afterlife in paintings of the Western Paradise. Meanwhile, lives of the dead are neatly chronicled in calligraphy on blue and white porcelain epitaph tablets.

* “Korean Arts of the Eighteenth Century: Splendor & Simplicity,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., through Aug. 21. Wed . -Thur., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Fri, 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Adults, $6; students and seniors, $4; children and students under 18, $1; children 5 and under, free; free admission second Wednesday of each month. General information (213) 857-6000; education programs (213) 857-6139.