Yeoung Shin Shim is currently a professor in the Department of History at Soongsil University in Seoul. She earned her master's degree in art history from Hongik University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, where she wrote her dissertation on the iconography of the Four Heavenly Kings. Before joining Soongsil University, she worked as a curator at the Gyeonggi Provincial Museum for nearly 20 years, during which she curated numerous special exhibitions. Her academic interests focus on the establishment and dissemination of Buddhist iconography and the religious, social, and cultural factors influencing these processes. Recently, she developed an interest in northern art, writing on Sogdian funerary art while conducting research on the artistic exchanges between Buddhism and the ancient Near Eastern and Iranian worlds.