Le savoir en trompe-l’œil. Corée, 18e–20e s. — Guimet, musée national des arts asiatiques, Paris, 16 September 2026 – 4 January 2027

In the Korea of the late eighteenth century, King Jeongjo had a problem that would be recognised in any open-plan office today: a library he loved and no time to read it. Taken up by affairs of state, he commissioned the painters of the royal academy to produce a folding screen that reproduced his own bookshelves in trompe-l’œil, so that he could at least remain in the company of his books. That screen is the beginning of chaekgeori, the Korean painted library — and the subject of the first exhibition the musée Guimet has devoted to it.

Le savoir en trompe-l’œil. Corée, 18e-20e s. gathers more than seventy-five works: screens and paintings, among them a national treasure — the self-portrait of one of the most celebrated artists of the Joseon period — and a confrontation between the scholar’s cabinet and its painted double, with the objects of scholarly ambition set beside their images: vessels for wine and tea, bronzes, porcelain, a watch, a spyglass, brushes. Books come from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Collège de France and the museum’s own collections.

The exhibition also unrolls, for the first time, a painted scroll of more than five metres from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. It belonged to Victor Collin de Plancy, the first official representative of France in Korea in 1876, and came to the museum with his collection; it was analysed by the national laboratory of the museums of France and restored for this show. The curator is Dr Arnaud Bertrand, the museum’s curator of the Korean and early Chinese collections.

Practical details

• Dates: 16 September 2026 – 4 January 2027
• Where: Guimet, musée national des arts asiatiques, 6 place d’Iéna, 75116 Paris, France
• Organised by: Guimet, musée national des arts asiatiques
• Curator: Dr Arnaud Bertrand
• Information: guimet.fr

Cultural Heritage Online lists this exhibition for readers who follow the painted interior — the room represented rather than inhabited. The chaekgeori screen does in ink and silk what European trompe-l’œil did in fresco, and it does it for the same reason: to keep near at hand a world one has no time to enter.