Jeong Jo-mun was born around 1918 in Korea. His father served as an official in the Korean government before Japan's annexation of the peninsula ended that life. The family relocated to Japan when Jeong was about six, joining the growing community of ethnic Koreans who navigated life as a marginalized minority in their colonial overlord's homeland. As a young man, Jeong labored in the physical trades, starting as a dockworker. His fortunes changed when he entered the pachinko business in Kyoto, eventually amassing enough wealth to pursue what became his life's work. He began collecting Korean art, drawn to ceramics and pottery that spanned centuries of Korean craftsmanship, from the Unified Silla period beginning in 668 through the Joseon dynasty that ended in 1897.

In 1969, Jeong began publishing a quarterly magazine showcasing the relics he had gathered. The publication ran for fifty issues, with the final edition appearing in 1981. But this was more than a collector's vanity project. In each issue, Jeong deliberately placed Korean art alongside the prevailing Japanese historical narrative that Koreans were unenlightened and possessed little culture of their own. The juxtaposition was pointed: here were celadon vessels, Buddhist paintings, and pottery of extraordinary refinement, produced by the very civilization that mainstream Japanese discourse dismissed. The Kyoto Shimbun, one of the city's major newspapers, published a favorable review praising the magazine and expressing regret that Korean people and their heritage had been viewed so poorly in Japan. The magazine became a quiet instrument of cultural diplomacy.

Jeong's ambitions expanded beyond his personal collection. In 1972, he and a group of historians launched a systematic search across the entirety of Japan for Korea-related relics -- artifacts that had been carried to Japan over centuries of trade, conflict, cultural exchange, and colonial appropriation. The effort grew far beyond its original scope. Around 500 people eventually joined the search, combing through private collections, antique shops, temples, and storehouses. The relics recovered through this nationwide effort formed the backbone of what would become the museum's permanent collection. According to the Encyclopedia of Korean Culture, the resulting holdings make it unique: no other institution outside the Korean peninsula is solely devoted to Korean art.

Rather than construct a purpose-built gallery, Jeong converted his own Kyoto residence into the museum's home. The Koryo Museum of Art opened its doors on October 25, 1988. Jeong Jo-mun died the following year, in 1989, at approximately 71 years of age. He did not live to see the museum's full impact, but the institution he created endures in the city where he built his fortune. The collection centers on pottery spanning more than a millennium of Korean artistic production, including pieces from the Unified Silla period, the Goryeo dynasty that gives the museum its name, and the Joseon era. Sitting in a residential Kyoto neighborhood rather than a museum district, the Koryo Museum of Art carries the quiet defiance of its founder -- a man who used wealth earned from Japanese pachinko machines to preserve and celebrate the Korean culture that Japan once tried to diminish.