他们能再创辉煌吗？巴约挂毯的暴走式成功让大英博物馆独树一帜，或许使其成为当今世界领先的博物馆——而它正迅速跟进推出韩国展，展示这片土地“2000年的创造力”，在20世纪遭受苦难之前，这里享有千年的宁静，至少从艺术作品来看是这样。但这是一个有着致命缺陷的大片展览，一个美丽却拼接粗糙的破碎花瓶。
Can they do it again? The runaway success of the Bayeux tapestry has put the British Museum in a league of its own, perhaps making it, at this moment, the leading museum on earth – and it’s rapidly following up with Korea, a survey of “2,000 years of creativity” in a land that, before its sufferings in the 20th century, enjoyed millennia of calm, at least to judge from its art. But it’s a blockbuster with a tragic flaw, a lovely broken vase badly stuck together.
你首先被引入一个美的涅槃。一口来自佛教寺院的巨大青铜钟，铸于公元8世纪，饰有龙、火焰和花卉浮雕，奠定了基调。它召唤你冥想。一面铜锣增添了和谐（如果你需要这种强调，展览配乐中现在必备的钟声和锣声正好提供）。我被韩国历史上的这个佛教时期深深吸引，当时来自印度的沉思宗教与中国的艺术影响相互作用，激发出狂喜的手抄经文（精神经典）和修长的小菩萨像（达到神圣觉悟的佛教圣徒）。
You are lured at first into a nirvana of beauty. A giant bronze bell from a Buddhist monastery, cast in the eighth century AD and bulging with dragons, flames and flowery embossments, strikes the tone. It calls you to meditation. A gong adds to the harmony (and if you need that underlining, there are bells and gongs on the now obligatory exhibition soundtrack). I was held rapt by this Buddhist period in Korea’s history, when the contemplative religion from India interacted with the artistic influence of China to inspire ecstatic hand-copied sutras (spiritual scriptures) and slender little statuettes of bodhisattvas (Buddhist saints who have achieved enlightened holiness).
然而，即使在佛教带来其空灵美学之前，朝鲜半岛工匠的机智就已令人惊叹。早在5世纪的精致陶器包括一匹站在圆形基座上的马，背上平衡着一个饮角——一个野性之美的实用器物。陶瓷从中国传入韩国，却在极具独创性的创作中扎根。高丽王朝（918-1392年统一半岛，并定佛教为国教）资助了精美的宫廷陶瓷。陶工采用了来自中国浙江省的青釉陶器——青瓷，并将其发扬光大，制成光滑淡绿的碗和瓶，抚慰你的心灵。
Yet even before Buddhism brought its ethereal aesthetic, the resourcefulness of artisans in the Korean peninsula was staggering. Intricate stoneware objects from as early as the fifth century include a horse standing on a circular plinth with a drinking horn balanced on its back – a practical object of wild beauty. Ceramics came to Korea from China but took root in creations of fantastic originality. The kingdom of Goryeo, which unified the peninsula from 918 to 1392 and made Buddhism the state religion, sponsored superb courtly ceramics. Potters adopted the green glazed stoneware, celadon, from China’s Zhejiang province and perfected it in smooth pale green bowls and vases that soothe your soul.
新儒家的李氏朝鲜王朝统治时期从1392年持续到令人惊讶的1897年，对精美陶器的偏好得以延续。这一时代最迷人的器物是一件18世纪制作的巨大、洁白、近乎球形的月亮罐。它是规模与几何学的迷人融合，由两个半圆形的碗拉坯成型后接合而成。你可以看到那个不完美、有凹痕的接合处，这在韩国文化中备受珍视，更增添了它的独特性与个性。
A flair for exquisite earthenware continued under the neo-Confucian Joseon dynasty, which ruled from 1392 until, astonishingly, 1897. The most captivating pot from this era is a huge, white, near-spherical moon jar made in the 18th century. It’s an intoxicating blend of scale and geometry created by throwing two semi-circular bowls and joining them together. You can see the imperfect, dimpled join, cherished in Korean culture, which adds to its uniqueness, its personality.
然而魔力随之破碎。展览突然、残酷地跳跃到一些平平无奇的20世纪初韩国艺术。传统艺术的现代拙仿与1900年代至1950年代的欧美风格现代主义尴尬地混杂在一起。为什么会有这种突变，就当你开始领会从佛教到新儒家的微妙转变及其审美差异时？韩国的文化史大片就此瓦解。毕竟，这只是一堆物品的集合。
And then the spell is broken. The show shifts forward suddenly, brutally, into some so-so early 20th-century Korean art. Modern pastiches of traditional art mix awkwardly with European and American-style modernism from the 1900s to 1950s. Why this lurch, just as you were starting to grasp the subtle shift from Buddhism to neo-Confucianism and how their aesthetics differ? The blockbuster cultural history of Korea falls apart. It’s just a collection of things, after all.
事实上，除了一些增补，这基本上是李健熙的收藏——他是三星集团会长，也是本次展览的“企业合作伙伴”，直到2020年去世。这是一个不错的收藏。此处展出的几件作品现归韩国主要博物馆收藏，是具有独特意义的国宝。但收藏带有主人的个人癖好，不能视为一个民族艺术与信仰的客观历史。若想讲述现代韩国史，这里缺乏照片、新闻报道、大众影像等，对此并无太多洞见。展览反而收缩为精英艺术的陈列。如果单纯呈现为一位收藏家的品味，倒也无可厚非。
In fact, this is, with a few additions, the collection of Lee Kun-hee, who was the chair of Samsung – the exhibition’s “corporate partner” – until his death in 2020. It’s a fine collection. Several works here, now owned by South Korea’s leading museums, are national treasures of unique significance. But a collection comes with its owner’s idiosyncrasies, and cannot be taken as an objective history of a people’s art and beliefs. It is not very insightful about the modern history of Korea: where are the photographs, news stories, popular imagery, if you want to tell that story? Instead the show shrinks into a display of elite art. Fair enough if it was simply presented as one collector’s taste.
20世纪对朝鲜半岛而言是残酷的时期：1910年至1945年，它沦为日本帝国的殖民地，但此处展出的舒适现代绘画对此只字未提。倒是更多提及了造成三百万人丧生的朝鲜战争。李仲燮的一幅绝望的、卡通般的粉彩画，描绘渔夫归家受家人欢迎，实则是一个未竟之梦：这位艺术家在战乱中沦为流离失所者，终生未能再见家人一面。他的另一幅粗线条作品描绘赤裸的身体被捆绑，令人不寒而栗地窥见了那个时代的恐怖。
The 20th century was a brutal period for Korea: from 1910 to 1945 it was colonised by the Japanese empire but the cosy modern paintings here say nothing about that. More mention is made of the Korean war that killed three million people. A desperate, cartoon-like pastel by Lee Jung-seop of a fisher being welcomed home by his family is an unfulfilled dream: this artist became a migrant in the war and died before ever seeing his family again. Another roughly drawn work by him shows naked bodies tied up in a chilling glimpse of the horrors of that time.
这种悲痛、混乱与文化断层——朝鲜半岛至今仍处于分裂状态——仅被微弱地唤起。真正留在心头的，是过去失落的和谐：文人与僧侣冥想自然之美。最壮丽地回应朝鲜山水的艺术品，是郑敾的挂轴《仁王山雨霁图》。这幅1751年水墨纸本作，宽逾一米，将观者带入一次清新、富有氛围感的自然邂逅：巨大的山体暗影笼罩画面，树木以迅疾湿润的笔触虚写。它非理想化，而是自发的。不禁让人遐想：郑敾与遥远的同时代人托马斯·庚斯博罗若相遇，会作何感想。
That grief, chaos and cultural loss – with Korea still divided today – is only slightly evoked. What stays with you is the lost harmony of the past, when scholars and monks meditated on nature and its beauties. The work of art that most gloriously responds to Korea’s landscapes is Jeong Seon’s hanging scroll Clearing After Rain on Mount Inwang. Done in ink on paper in 1751, this more than metre-wide view takes you into a fresh, atmospheric encounter with nature: a dark mass of mountain hangs over the scene while trees are evoked as rapid moist blurs. It is not idealised but spontaneous. You wonder what Jeong and his faraway contemporary Thomas Gainsborough might have made of each other.
或许，展览中这种破碎感——过去之美与现代暴力毫无关联——道出了一个悲剧真理。最后一件展品暗示了这一点。徐道昊2019年的自画像，藏于大英博物馆，描绘艺术家作为渺小身影，伫立于从悬浮的韩式传统房屋意象倾泻而下的五彩线缆瀑布之下。这个世界的优雅在展览中挽留着你，让你感受到它的消逝如同个人之痛，无论你来自何方。
Perhaps the broken feeling of the show, in which there is no link between past beauty and modern violence, tells us a tragic truth. The very last object implies this. Do Ho Suh’s 2019 self portrait, owned by the British Museum, depicts the artist as a tiny figure under a cascade of multicoloured threads streaming down from a floating image of a traditional Korean house. The grace of this world holds you in this exhibition and you feel its vanishing as a personal loss, wherever you come from.