Word: koryo
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...this "very young 19-year-old in a dirndl skirt," as she later wrote, preferred the road less traveled. En route she would find herself spending hours with the gallery's collections of ancient Chinese and Korean ceramics. In the green celadon glaze of a Koryo Dynasty bowl or the elliptical lid of a Song court vessel, she found pieces of perfection - and the source of her art. It's a discovery wonderfully echoed in the show: to approach the retrospective you must first walk through the Kent Collection as the 19-year-old would have done...
...bombs, from the spent fuel. Appearing at the door of the Yongbyon guesthouse accommodating the two U.N. inspectors, a smiling North Korean official read aloud a letter informing them it was time to leave--immediately. The official volunteered that there were in fact two seats on the next Air Koryo flight from Pyongyang to Beijing. The inspectors left with 14 discs of surveillance-video footage and 200 discarded seals...
...delicate celadon bowls. They carted off stone carvings, pagodas and priceless reliquary caskets from Buddhist temples and removed tens of thousands of ancient manuscripts from libraries. The choicest booty was often bestowed on the Emperor?like the prized blue celadon ceramics found only in the tombs of the Koryo dynasty nobility around Kaesong (now in North Korea near the border with the South). Ancient pots and spears and the like disappeared into storerooms and collections at Japan's biggest universities. Soon after the Japanese left, a young Korean National Museum official named Hwang Su Young went to Kaesong and surveyed...
Well, you wouldn't know they were keen from the behavior of government officials or the cowed population on the street. The minders tried to keep the journalists cooped up inside the Hotel Koryo - clean and pleasant enough, with good Korean food, Japanese beer and working phone lines. The diplomats staying at the hotel were told in their pre-trip briefing in D.C. that they would be in the part of the hotel that was bugged and had surveillance, while the journalists were in the bug-free tower...
Breakfast the next morning at the Hotel Koryo was a treat. Pickled pollack spawn - a brown spiced salty fishy paste - and other delicacies were laid out on the buffet. The room had a mirrored ceiling, a fluorescent painting, two scary ceramic dancing pigs on the buffet table and very loud, saccharine Korean love songs coming over the PA. Guests sat alone in the middle of the room surrounded by six bow-tied waiters...