The British Museum opened its first large exhibition of Korean art in 42 years on Thursday, built largely around national treasures from the collection of Lee Kun-hee, the late Samsung chairman.
The show, Korea: 2,000 Years of Creativity, presents 100 works totaling 185 objects, including 10 designated national treasures and 13 treasures from the Lee collection. It is the museum’s first major Korean presentation since a 1984 exhibition billed as “5,000 Years of Korean Art,” and it runs through Jan. 31, 2027, with tickets from £18, according to the museum.
At the entrance, visitors pass a line from Mr. Lee, who died in 2020: “Collecting and preserving cultural heritage is vital for the future of humanity. It is a universal obligation, one mandated by our times.”
London follows stops at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington in November and the Art Institute of Chicago in March, which together drew nearly 200,000 visitors, and it is the collection’s final overseas stop, according to The Korea Herald. The British Museum draws about six million visitors a year.
Inside the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery, a softly lit “time tunnel” moves through Korean history in four chapters: “Wealth and Power” for the Three Kingdoms era, “Wisdom and Beauty” for Goryeo, “the Joy of Learning” for Joseon and “Individuality and Society” for the modern age. The works span roughly 2,300 years, from about 300 B.C. to the present. Several pieces are being exhibited for the first time, among them the Daegu Bisan-dong bronzes, a national treasure, and bird-wing-shaped crown ornaments.
Period objects are paired with work by living Korean artists. A Goryeo celadon sits beside Translated Vase (2018) by Lee Soo-kyung. The pairing, the museum said in a statement, shows how artists across the ages have continually reinterpreted the past, carried on living traditions and pushed creative boundaries outward.
Other rooms work through the senses. Before Jeong Seon’s 1751 painting of Mount Inwang after the summer rains, video art reproduces the mountain’s clouds and the sound of rain. A Goryeo temple bell rings softly, in a recording from the National Museum of Korea. Next to Magpie and Tiger, a folk painting shown for the first time, a screen plays the tiger character from the 2025 animated hit KPop Demon Hunters. “We used every display technique we could so Korean art would reach local audiences in an easy, friendly way,” said Kim Sang-ah, the museum’s senior curator for Korea. Most people in Britain, especially the young, know Korea through its popular culture, she told Reuters. She said the global wave of K-culture had created more material for such crossovers, though many ideas didn’t get made because of copyright issues in South Korea, “which is a shame.”
The modern section opens with Paradise (1936) by Paik Nam-soon, the first Korean woman painter to study in Paris. She painted the folding screen in Jongju, in what is now North Korea, and sent it to a friend on the southern island of Wando as a wedding gift; it merges the brushwork of East Asian landscape painting with Western oil technique. Lee Jung-seob’s Hyeonhaetan, Choi Jong-tae’s sculpture Thinking Woman and Brahms, a video sculpture by Nam June Paik, are also touring for the first time.
Jessica Harrison-Hall, head of the museum’s Asia department, called the show a rare chance to study “the remarkable individuality and creativity Koreans have shown across more than 2,000 years.” In Europe, she said, the desire to understand Korea more deeply is growing quickly, “and the thought that these ‘national treasures’ may never be seen here again has seized people’s imagination.”
Samsung, whose founding family assembled the collection, has promoted the show across London. A 20-minute advertisement reworking royal court imagery, including the Sun, Moon and Five Peaks screen, played on the Piccadilly Lights at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, with more ads running in Kensington, Knightsbridge and at Heathrow Airport. A Danish couple in their 20s told a correspondent for the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo they had never seen anything like the Piccadilly display. “It’s a truly enormous advertisement,” they said.
On Wednesday evening, about 200 guests attended an opening dinner in the museum’s Great Court. The guest of honor was the Princess Royal, the sister of King Charles III; Jay Y. Lee, Samsung’s executive chairman and the late chairman’s son, greeted her at the museum entrance. Hong Ra-hee, honorary director of the Leeum Museum of Art, Yoo Hong-jun, director of the National Museum of Korea, and Park Jin, a former South Korean foreign minister, were also there.