When Korean Culture Flourished

In the geography of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the gallery devoted to Korea acts as a sort of land bridge between China and South Asia that all too often serves as passage rather than destination. The first in a series of shows to be held over the next 10 to 15 years, "Art of the Korean Renaissance, 1400-1600" may change this.

With only 47 objects, the exhibition explores a fertile 200-year period in Korea's cultural history, revealing as much through its choice of works as it does through the order in which it displays them. The show's modest size makes the point that, sadly, little has survived from this period, when the Joseon -- or Fresh Dawn -- dynasty (1392-1910) united the Korean peninsula militarily, established Confucianism as the national ideology and introduced a phonetic alphabet.

The high-fired stoneware that came to be dubbed buncheong represents Korea's most famous legacy. Fittingly, examples are sprinkled throughout the show.

The lines are not always plumb and the forms not perfectly rounded, giving buncheong-ware an appealing, rustic connection to the hands that shaped it. A late 15th- to early 16th-century piece perhaps best embodies buncheong's spirit: On a slightly off-kilter drum-shaped vessel the artist has drawn a bird, wings and tail extended, swooping to catch a fish. The scene is flanked by lotuses, which rise like charmed snakes from a wavy sea. It is easy to see why Japanese tea masters prized this pottery when, during the Japanese invasion and subsequent Imjin War (1592-1598), the Japanese brought many pieces and potters back to their homeland.

In most cases, this homegrown stoneware is displayed next to porcelains, showing off the latter's sleek lines and designs. At a time when Ming China was producing polychrome and blue-and-white porcelains, the works here stand out for their plainness, reflecting the effort to instill neo-Confucian ideals by restricting the import of Chinese porcelains and reining in decoration.

Another remarkable innovation is King Sejong's introduction of hangeul, the phonetic alphabet that appears in two books in the show. Interestingly, the letters in the first one, printed in 1447, just four years after hangeul's introduction, are geometric and blocky. In the second book, dated 1567-1608, the font emulates the stroke of the calligraphic line.

The alphabet, according to curator Soyoung Lee, was "not necessarily a negation of the brush." This is borne out in the selection of landscapes, the foremost genre of Korean painting in the 15th century.

Landscapes gained pre-eminence in part because early Joseon rulers banned Buddhism from public life and in part because the Joseon literati held the view that nature was the paradigm of the ideal world order. As two sets of landscapes illustrate, Korean painters in this period revived a love for China's Xiao and Xiang rivers in Hunan province, a subject much favored in the Chinese Song dynasty (960-1279).

In the first set -- two of eight panels painted in the mid- to late 1400s -- fluid brushstrokes create scenes in which the very rocks seem to weep. The second set, composed of eight 16th-century paintings, exudes different moods, from a serene horizontal composition to a windswept landscape with strong diagonals in which the artist's brushstrokes range from ax-hard to wire-thin.

Faithfulness to classical themes did not, however, stifle personal interpretation. Tradition dictates that in depictions of "Evening Bell From Mist-Shrouded Temple" two figures be shown listening. But none appear in the show's 15th-century painting, leaving it up to the viewer to hear the distant chime in the contours and lines.

A similar surprise awaits in a group of scenes celebrating various stages of civil service. In the first painting, little figures sit in tidy rows outside a building where matching figures have staged a celebration for successful candidates. In the second, similar figures mingle in a red-columned pagoda set amid a smattering of trees and rounded mountains in the distance.

But in "Gathering of Government Officials" (1551), nature suddenly dislodges the officials from center stage. They are now relegated to the bottom while a mountain stream cascading through rocks fills the top two-thirds of the hanging scroll. Compared to the show's landscape paintings, this mountain scene is tidy and controlled, perhaps suggesting Joseon officialdom's idealized view of nature.

Whether this was the case or not, the painting offers a counterpoint to the Buddhist imagery in another five paintings, including a late 16th-century "Medicine Buddha Triad" remarkable for its rich rendering of fabrics and faces; and one bronze of Amitabha Buddha, flanked by two bodhisattvas. The composition is balanced, the expressions serene, and the matching folds in the robes imbue the piece with a quiet rhythm.

Again, the layout of the artworks helps tell the story. Depending on whether you enter the gallery from China or South Asia, you tour the show clockwise or counterclockwise and either start or end with Buddhist works. Both routes are accurate. Buddhism preceded the Joseon and, about 150 years into the dynasty's reign, dowager Queen Munjeong oversaw a revival of Buddhist worship.

Ms. Lawrence