Most collections were assembled to be admired. This one was assembled to stop things leaving.
Jeon Hyeong-pil inherited a great deal of money in his twenties, in a country that was not at that point permitted to be a country. Korea was under Japanese rule; paintings, porcelain and books were going out of it steadily and legally. What he did with the inheritance was buy them back — at auction, from dealers, from a British lawyer named Gadsby whose entire holding of Goryeo celadon he took in one transaction — and then, in 1938, he built them a house in Seongbuk-dong and called it Bohwagak, the hall for gathering treasures. It was the first privately founded museum in Korea. His sons renamed it for his pen name, Kansong, in 1966. I have not been, and the correct thing to say about a house like this is that I have read about it, at length, and that reading is not the same.
The building itself interests me almost as much as what is in it. Bohwagak is credited to Park Kil-yong, one of the first generation of Korean architects, and it is not a pavilion or a hall in any traditional idiom — it is an off-white modern box with a Bauhaus temperament and an asymmetry that reads, in photographs, as deliberate mischief rather than error. A man buying back the deep past chose the newest available architecture to keep it in. During the recent restoration the original drawings surfaced, among the oldest surviving architectural blueprints in the country, and they became the reopening exhibition. There is a live scholarly argument about whether Park in fact designed it; I have no standing in that argument and no intention of pretending otherwise, but I would like to stand in front of the elevation and see what the building says for itself.
The difficulty — and the reason this entry has sat unvisited on my list for years rather than months — is the calendar. Kansong has never behaved like a museum with a season ticket. It opened for a fortnight in spring and a fortnight in autumn and shut again; then it closed altogether in 2014 for a very long refurbishment, with new storage and conservation rooms finished in 2022 and Bohwagak itself reopening in May 2024. The showings are longer now, about forty-five days each spring and autumn, and this year's spring exhibition ran from mid-April into June. That is generous by Kansong's standards and still means the flight is booked after the dates are published, not before. Places should not be scheduled around. They should be waited for.
The plates are held empty on purpose. I do not publish photographs of rooms I have not stood in.
He paid the price of ten houses for a book about letters.
In 1940 a copy of the Hunminjeongeum Haerye came onto the market — the commentary that sets out, in 1446, how the Korean alphabet was designed and why each letter is shaped as it is. Jeon bought it. The figure usually given is ten thousand won, and the way Koreans still describe that sum is the price of ten tiled-roof houses. He was buying, in the middle of an occupation that was suppressing the language, the document that explains it.
It survived the colonial period and then a war. Exactly how is the kind of story that accretes detail with each retelling, and I would rather see the object under glass than repeat the legend at second hand. What is not in dispute is the outcome: it is here, in Seongbuk-dong, in a private house, because one man decided in his twenties that this was what money was for.
I have written this from the study, which is why it ends without the sentence it wants. That sentence belongs to whichever spring I finally get the dates right.