If you are in the DC area and you brave the cold this week, you can visit the National Museum of Asian Art (in the underground Sackler portion) to see the exhibition, “Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared” (until February 1). I visited the exhibition last Friday, when it wasn’t so cold. (Coincidentally, the Prime Minister of South Korean, Kim Min-soek, and his rather large entourage also visited that afternoon, but luckily I had been through the exhibition at my leisure before they showed up!)

The exhibition stretches over two floors and ten galleries, but the art work is well organized and seeing the whole thing didn’t seem overwhelming. I didn’t get nearly as worn out as a December visit to the Grandma Moses exhibition at the American Art Museum, but maybe because –pardon me, Grandma — that exhibition seemed like endless variations on a fairly narrow theme. I did learn a lot about Anna Mary Robertson Moses, her life and her art work, and I would not advise you against visiting. (It is also up for longer, so there is not as big a rush.) After all, the wonderful thing about Washington, DC is that there are so many world class free museums. If you don’t fancy something you set out to visit, or the whole museum for that matter, you only invested your time and can move on to another!

So, what kept me energized at the Korean exhibition? I guess I have always enjoyed interesting juxtapositions of art work, and the curators did a really interesting job of this. At the entrance, for instance, there is a whole wall dedicated to “moon jars” – including an actual ceramic moon jar, and then moon jars depicted in art work from various periods of time.

Then again, I do love a good “cabinet of curiosities” and the exhibition had a few examples of the Korean versions of this phenomenon. The entry to the museum features a preview of that concept, with a silhouette of shelving holding art pieces foreshadowing things to come. The next iteration is a painted screen depicting art work, books, decorative food, and other items that would have adorned a scholar’s space. (Scholars were actually revered back then.) Toward the end of the exhibition, the cabinet of curiosities idea is updated and reimagined on open shelves. You can explore an interactive of what is on the shelves here.

I found myself drawn to several other art works that invited me to look closer, drawing me into a game of “I Spy” – I remember these books keeping my daughter amused for relatively long periods of time. I spent a while examining several large scale paintings, exploring tiny vignettes and hidden-in-plain-sight images. It was a lot of fun.

Of course, there also was the Irworobongdo or “Five Mountains with Sun and Moon” screen, which gained a lot of notice since it had used briefly as a background for a scene in “K-Pop Demon Hunters” (which I had to watch on Netflix the evening after I visited the exhibition, causing a severe ear worm all the next day.)

I’m sorry I didn’t visit and report on the exhibition earlier, because I am giving it a big thumbs-up for these reasons and plenty more. It was a great afternoon out. Check out some of my favorite highlights in these photos, and spend some time “spying with your little eye”!