Sunwoo Hwang
The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art (NMAA) in Washington, D.C., has named Sunwoo Hwang as its inaugural Korea Foundation Curator of Korean Art and Culture. Her position will be funded through a matching gift from the Korea Foundation and an amount from the NMAA.
Starting this fall, Hwang will begin to oversee curatorial and cultural programming initiatives, including stewarding the museum’s growing collection of Korean objects and reinstalling the permanent gallery dedicated to the country in the Freer Gallery in 2027.
Hwang will also facilitate a major loan exhibition with the National Museum of Korea that features 200 items from the family collection of former Samsung chairman Lee Kun-hee. The show is scheduled to take place in November 2025.
“We haven’t had a large loan show like this in 30 years,” Hwang said. “I think it will give our audience a rare chance to view Korean art across time, through a different range of objects.”
In 2009, Hwang received her masters degree from the University of Chicago. She is currently a doctoral candidate at Dongguk University in Seoul, South Korea, specializing in Buddhist wall paintings in China’s Shanxi province.