David Young Kim
David Young Kim is Professor of Art History at University of Pennsylvania and author of several books, most recently of Groundwork: A History of the Renaissance Picture (Princeton University Press, 2022). He is also co-director of the film-essay The Desert and the Lagoon. He is currently working on a project titled Lives Found in Translation: Giorgio Vasari in Korea.
The year before I started doctoral study in Italian Renaissance art history, my family sent me to spend nine months in Seoul. The aim was to repair my broken Korean. To prepare myself for graduate applications, I had studied Latin and German, French and Italian. But the language of my birth somehow ended up lost and buried. Sentences fell apart when I spoke.