Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia was a small exhibition with a big ambition. Roughly twenty objects including drawings, paintings, prints, costumes, and illustrated books were arranged in two galleries to suggest a comprehensive outlook of how Asia was conceived by Europeans in the late sixteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Special attention was given to Man in Korean Costume (ca. 1617), Peter Paul Rubens’s famed drawing owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum. The first section of the exhibition focused on how European missionaries encountered and viewed Asia—China, in particular—and how Rubens’s depictions helped to transmit such views as the Jesuits sought to spread Catholicism on the other side of the world. The second gallery was mostly devoted to verifying that the key work of the exhibition, Man in Korean Costume, was indeed a depiction of Korean attire.

In the first gallery, books documenting the early missionaries’ encounters with China and their understandings of this foreign land, alongside drawings, seamlessly supported the narrative that Rubens was well aware of Asia and that it was a recurrent subject in his art. The vividly illustrated India Orientalis Pars II (1599) by Johann Theodor de Bry contains some of the earliest depictions of the Chinese by Europeans. It showed the Chinese and their costumes from a European perspective, and likely informed Rubens’s perception of China. Although the figures may look to us more European than Chinese in terms of facial features and hair, it seems that their exotic costumes with voluminous folds were enough to indicate their foreign identities at the time.

Through the drawings and an oil sketch in this section, viewers were able to follow how these earlier visual vignettes were embellished and incorporated into the depictions of Asia by Rubens and his contemporaries. Missionaries such as Nicolas Trigault, a Flemish leader of the Jesuits’ Chinese mission, brought back Chinese costumes that inspired more exotic renderings of costumes by Rubens. Several portrayals by Rubens and his workshop of Trigault wearing the robes of a Chinese scholar effectively demonstrated the Flemish master’s—and by extension Europe’s—knowledge of the distant foreign land, while eliciting curiosity toward the country that largely remained unknown.

Nonetheless, the focal point of the exhibition was Man in Korean Costume. This extraordinary drawing is enigmatic in several ways. First, the ethnicity of the man in the drawing appears to be unidentifiable: physiognomy such as high cheekbones and flat nose suggest his Asian ethnicity, but short, curled hair slipping out from his headband obscures this identification as that was not how Asian, and more specifically Korean, males dressed their hair. Secondly, the costume is missing the top part of the headgear and the footwear is also not shown, unlike other drawings done by the artist or his pupils. Furthermore, it lacks the artist’s usual notes on colors or other details that were useful when such drawings were later executed as paintings. However, the artist’s attention to detail and the additional colors applied to enliven the figure’s lips and cheeks suggest that Rubens must have drawn this figure from his genuine interest in Asia, if not Korea specifically. The questions surrounding the drawing and its sitter have not diminished the drawing’s popularity or intrigue over the centuries. It was reproduced and studied widely by Rubens’s students and followers. Head of Man in Korean Costume (1628–30) by Willem Panneels and Siamese Ambassador (1774) by Captain William Baillie, an etching after the drawing, were on display nearby to verify the influence of Rubens’s drawing.

In the first gallery was also a striking oil sketch for the Miracles of Saint Francis Xavier Altarpiece (ca. 1617) by Rubens, which helped to elaborate the idea that Rubens was looking at Korea specifically as his artistic source. The inclusion of this sketch (and a reproduction of the finished altarpiece) proved how much research went into the preparation of the exhibition and the study of Man in Korean Costume. In addition, it was a rare treat for Southern Californian museum-goers to see how the Flemish artist prepared the monumental altarpiece. The similarities between the costumes in the drawing and in the altarpiece suggest that Rubens may have used the drawing as a model for a figure in the altarpiece, but whether the costume was Korean, as proposed, or the artist’s fanciful interpretation of Chinese costume, is yet uncertain.

Overall, the first section of the exhibition was successful in building the narrative that Rubens was much interested in depicting his understanding of Asia and its culture. During the artist’s lifetime, Jesuit missionaries were actively exploring Asia to proselytize, and the knowledge of Asia they brought back became useful resources for Rubens and his contemporaries. Nonetheless, this section was more effective at telling the story of how Rubens might have understood China, despite the centerpiece of the exhibition being Man in Korean Costume.

The second gallery aimed to confirm that Man in Korean Costume was indeed an attempt to illustrate Korean costume, and that Korea was already known to Europe at the time of Rubens’s drawing. As curator Stephanie Schrader notes in the accompanying publication, Looking East: Rubens’s Encounter with Asia, the drawing was mistakenly identified as a Siamese ambassador from the eighteenth century until 1935, when art historian Clare Stuart Wortley recognized the costume as that of Korea. Schrader agrees with this claim, and devoted the second part of the exhibition to providing convincing contexts for this identification. The approach was twofold: first, a small selection of contemporaneous costumes and headgear from Korea were presented as comparative sources similar to what Rubens might have studied for his drawing; second, two silk paintings, each portraying a Joseon scholar wearing similar robes and headgear, were displayed nearby. These spectacular and seldom-seen objects were loaned from prominent Korean institutions including the National Museum of Korea and the National Folk Museum of Korea. Thanks to their inclusion in the exhibition, viewers were able to compare these original sources to Rubens’s Man in Korean Costume. In her label, Schrader was careful to inform viewers that the Flemish master “fashioned the foreign attire to his own liking,” that is to say, that the drawing does not document a Korean man or Korean costume, but rather represents Rubens’s own freely adopted interpretation. Regardless of whether the artist depicted Korean costume with the aid of actual examples or from his imagination, it was remarkable to see this drawing serve as a catalyst for this unexpected and meaningful collaboration between Korean and U.S. scholars four centuries later.

Several historical materials, such as world maps, a journal, and a travelogue, were great additions to this section, attesting to the awareness of Korea by Europe, despite Korea being officially closed to Europe at the time. The Orbis Terrarum (Map of the World, 1594) by Petrus Plancius, which shows the hermit country as a peninsula, convincingly supported the idea that Rubens may have acquired knowledge of Korea and Korean costume. Firsthand accounts of Korea by Hendrik Hamel in Journal of the Unlucky Voyage of the Sperwer (1670) and by Francesco Carletti in Ragionamenti di Francesco Carletti Fiorentino (1701) further established that Europe indeed had knowledge of Korea, enhancing the possibility that the costume could be Korean.

The two galleries unpacked a multilayered conundrum of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century history with visually interesting and historically significant materials. Instead of looking at Rubens’s or his contemporaries’ depictions of Asia in isolation, the exhibition gathered visual sources and firsthand accounts to give a more comprehensive understanding of how an artist like Rubens was able to portray foreign culture without encountering it firsthand. It remains difficult to determine how much Rubens drew on actual resources and how much came from his imaginative vision of an Asian man or Asian costume. It has been more than three decades since Edward Said eloquently criticized Europe’s exoticizing view of the Orient in his landmark Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). That the drawing was reattributed from Siamese Ambassador to Man in Korean Costume (notably, not a Korean man) in part shows the effect of Said’s work in revealing cultural misperceptions. The exhibition rejected the idea of all non-Westerners as “other” while showing how far we have had to come from that idea, as the exhibition’s source materials demonstrate that for Rubens and his contemporaries the Westerner-other dichotomy was precisely the norm.