Connection with Harvard: Archiving Red in the Forbes Pigment Collection
I have always felt that Korean art and material traditions are underrepresented in international collections. Despite the recent global popularity of K-pop and familiar cultural symbols such as tigers, Korea's traditional colours, materials, and the craftsmanship behind them remain relatively unfamiliar, particularly in conservation and materials research.
In the summer of 2026, I reached out to the Harvard Art Museums' Forbes Pigment Collection to introduce traditional Korean colourants. I had been building my own small collection of Korean natural dyes and pigments and was inspired by the Forbes Collection's approach to gathering and preserving colour materials from around the world. Although Korean natural dyeing has centuries of history, much of its practical knowledge is still passed down directly from master artisans to apprentices, with limited documentation accessible to international researchers.
After several exchanges with Narayan Khandekar, Director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard welcomed my proposal to contribute samples of traditional Korean colourants. I began working with master artisans to assemble collections of materials accompanied by technical and ethnographic documentation.
My first contribution focused on hongyeom (홍염), traditional Korean safflower red dyeing. Working with Master Kim Gyeong-yeol, I collected dried safflower, safflower-dyed silk and yarn, and a personally inscribed copy of his book.
The collaboration subsequently expanded to namyeom (남염), traditional Korean indigo dyeing, through Master Jeong Kwan-chae. I assembled and shipped three textile samples representing different stages of indigo dyeing, a jjok leaf (Persicaria tinctoria) from the plant cultivated by Master Jeong, and a copy of his publication. Since both masters' books are written in Korean, I also prepared English documentation explaining the historical context, manufacturing processes, and personal histories of the practitioners.
Harvard expressed particular interest in expanding its representation of Korean colour traditions. Although the collection already holds raw materials such as azurite, cinnabar, and indigo, it lacks sufficient examples of how these materials are traditionally prepared and used in Korean practices such as dancheong (decorative architectural painting) and yeomsaek (dyeing). The conservation team also expressed interest in hwangto (황토), Korean yellow ochre, as part of its wider research into soil-based dyeing traditions.
I am now researching these materials and contacting practitioners who continue to produce them using traditional methods. My aim is to contribute further samples accompanied by signed provenance records from their makers.
Provenance is central to this work. Knowing the chemical composition of a pigment is not the same as understanding how it was made, who produced it, or why particular methods have been preserved across generations. Alongside the physical samples, I seek to document each master's experiences and perspectives on their craft. This ethnographic context helps connect scientific material analysis with the cultural knowledge behind each color. I hope to continue expanding the representation of Korean colourants at Harvard and beyond so that I can make both the materials and the knowledge behind them more accessible to researchers around the world.