Yeongik Seo

Yeongik Seo is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in Japanese painting of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. His dissertation focuses on Kano Sanraku’s work for the former Shōden’in in Kyoto. The project examines how Sanraku’s reworking of inherited Chinese and Kano imagery gave established pictorial subjects new compositions and visual functions, contributing to a broader reorientation of Kano painting in the early seventeenth century.

His broader interests include the circulation of pictorial motifs across East Asia, the ways materials and formats shape images, and the relationships among painting, patronage, and spectatorship. He received his M.A. in Art History from Seoul National University with a thesis titled “A Study of Willows, Bridge, and Waterwheel Screens.”