LIVES FOUND IN TRANSLATION: GIORGIO VASARI IN SOUTH KOREA WITH DAVID YOUNG KIM

In this Research and Academic Program lecture, David Young Kim (University of Pennsylvania / Clark Professor, 2025–2026) poses the question: Is there such a thing as an “art historical self”? And if so, where might we locate that self amid its scholarship and the labor of translation? As a preliminary response to these questions this talk offers an account of Giorgio Vasari’s Lives (1550/1568), arguably art history’s foundational text, and its first complete translation in an East Asian language. Published in Seoul in 1986, Pachaliŭi itallia lŭnesangsŭ misulkachŏn (Vasari’s Lives of Italian Renaissance Artists) took the translator Lee Keun Bai some 20 years to complete. He carried out this nightly work under two conditions: first, the restored legality of the Korean language after Japanese colonial domination, and second, the impossibility of returning to his home region and forced separation from his family after the Korean War. His vocation prompts consideration of the reception of canonical “Western” art history in “non-Western” areas, on the one hand; more broadly, Lee’s self-decentered work inspires thoughts on the role of language in life-writing and the meaning of existence in the face of war and uncertain death.

Presented in person in the Clark auditorium. A 5 pm reception in the Manton Research Center reading room precedes the event.

Image: Boxed set of 바자리의이탈리아르네상스미술가전 (Vasari’s Lives of Italian Renaissance Artists), edited and translated by Lee Keun Bai. Seoul: Tam Gu Dang Publishers, 1986.