Young Yang Chung

Dr. Young Yang Chung is a world renowned textile historian and accomplished embroiderer. She earned a Ph.D. at New York University in 1976, with a doctoral dissertation on the origins of embroidery and its historical development of China, Japan, and Korea, and has lectured worldwide on the topic of East Asian embroidery. Through lectures, demonstrations, writings, teaching, workshops, and exhibitions of her work, she has endeavored to foster appreciation of an art form often stigmatized as "women's work” and to challenge the notion of textiles as "minor arts".

Chung has dedicated her life to the textile arts, not only as an accomplished embroiderer and teacher of this art form but also as a historian of traditional East Asian textiles and a collector of outstanding examples. Her embroideries are included in the collections of numerous museums in the world including the Smithsonian Institution and the presidential palaces.

Her legacy includes a body of groundbreaking publications such as The Art of Oriental Embroidery (1979) and Silken Threads: A History of Embroidery in China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam (2005), as well as the Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum (C.E.M.), an exhibition, educational, and research facility she inaugurated in May 2004 at Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul, South Korea.

Chung was the curator of The Chung Young Yang Embroidery Museum's inaugural exhibition, which traces the origins of silk embroidery in China and its dissemination throughout East Asia, and she will remain at the Museum as a director and curator, in addition to being a professor of graduate school of arts and designs.