[Contribution] Encountering Korea at the British Museum

By You Min-jung

Eighteen pounds. Quite a sum for a museum where the permanent collections are free to visit. Yet people were queuing for tickets to the British Museum's exhibition on Korea.

Inside, visitors young and old were moving slowly through the galleries. I hadn't expected so many people to turn out for Korea's historical treasures. Even more surprising was that most appeared to be Westerners rather than Koreans. Nor were they simply passing through. They leaned in to read the labels and lingered over each piece, looking closely and at length.

In early October, I traveled to London to give a lecture on Korean intellectual history at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. On the morning of my flight home, I returned to the British Museum, just a short walk from SOAS, for the first time in nearly a decade.

I was curious to see how one of the world's great museums would tell Korea's story. "Korea: 2,000 Years of Creativity" brings together more than 180 objects and artworks, most drawn from the collection of the late Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee, which his family donated to South Korea in 2021. It is the British Museum's first major exhibition of Korean art and history since its landmark show in 1984.

The word that caught my eye was “creativity.” For decades, Korea was associated with poverty, national division and, more recently, with economic success. Here, the focus was on creativity.

The “2,000 Years” in the title also placed today's Korean Wave within a much longer history of cultural exchange and reinvention. The folk painting "Magpie and Tiger" brought to mind the global hit "KPop Demon Hunters," while Choi Jong-tae's "Thinking Woman" recalled the quiet, contemplative pose of Korea's celebrated gilt-bronze Pensive Bodhisattva. From the outset, the exhibition brought past and present into conversation.

The exhibition takes visitors through four periods, from ancient Korea to Goryeo, Joseon and the modern era. Yet each section begins with a theme rather than a dynasty: “Wealth and Power,” “Wisdom and Beauty,” “Learning and Pleasure,” and “Individuality and Community.” Instead of a procession of unfamiliar royal houses, visitors encounter ideas they can readily relate to. Even without much knowledge of Korean history, they have a way into the story. It is a thoughtful approach, making Korea's past accessible without losing what makes it distinctive.

The elaborate ornaments of ancient Korea tell a story of wealth and political authority. In “Wisdom and Beauty,” however, it was not the celebrated Goryeo celadon that first drew my attention, but a beautifully crafted case for Buddhist scriptures. Goryeo's artistic achievements, it reminded me, owed as much to religious devotion and intellectual life as to the skill of its craftsmen. Further on stood a great Buddhist bell, its imposing form accompanied by the soft resonance of its ringing. I found it hard to move on. For a moment, I could hear the world of Goryeo as well as see it.

“Learning and Pleasure” immediately brought to mind the opening words of the Analects: “Is it not a pleasure to learn and to practise what one has learned?” What better way to introduce British visitors to the Confucian ideal of finding joy in learning? Moon jars and paintings showed how scholarship, art and everyday life came together in Joseon society. The highlight for me was Jeong Seon's "Clearing After Rain on Mount Inwang." The painting captures the mountain just after a downpour, its dark, ink-washed rocks emerging from expanses of white mist. Beside the original, digital projections brought those contrasts to life, turning an 18th-century landscape into an immersive experience.

The final section, “Individuality and Community,” explores how social change found expression in modern Korean art.

I was particularly struck by the contrasting portrayals of women. A woman in hanbok and another in a Western-style dress offered a glimpse of a society in transition. In Park Soo Keun's "Woman Pounding Grain," an ordinary domestic task became the subject of a painting.

Park Nosoo's "Mountain Spirit," with its woman riding a blue horse along a mountain path, reimagined a familiar landscape motif through bold color and an unexpected composition. Works by Nam June Paik and Suh Do-ho took the story beyond Korea, showing how its traditions and memories could find new expression in contemporary art.

The strength of the exhibition lay not simply in what it displayed, but in how it told the story. Rather than lining up objects in chronological order, it connected them to the beliefs, ideas and everyday lives of the people who made and used them.

The curators also showed real imagination in their presentation. The Goryeo bell came alive through sound, while a Joseon landscape unfolded through moving images. The creativity of the title belonged as much to the exhibition itself as to the works it celebrated.

As a scholar of Korean intellectual history, however, I paused at one phrase: “Celebrating the Good Life,” used to introduce the cultural life of late Joseon. A chaekgado, a painting of books and prized objects arranged on shelves, captured the refined tastes of the period.

Yet behind those tastes lay a more complicated history. After the devastating Japanese invasions of the 1590s and the Manchu invasions of the 1630s, Joseon underwent a long period of recovery and social change. By the 18th century, diplomatic missions to Qing China were bringing books, ideas and goods into Korea. The objects depicted in chaekgado are traces of that wider world of exchange. I would have liked to see more of the history behind the prosperity on display.

My time in Britain also left me thinking about the place of Korean studies in Europe. We often hear about Europe's growing fascination with Korea, but what I saw told a more mixed story. At Blackwell's, the famous Oxford bookshop, I found plenty of books on China, Japan and India in the Asia section, but very little on Korea.

In one university's Asian studies center, notice boards for other regions were covered with announcements, while the one devoted to Korea stood conspicuously empty. The worldwide enthusiasm for Korean culture, I realized, had not necessarily been matched by the same level of interest in its history.

Of course, such impressions hardly tell the whole story of Korean studies in Britain. The field has a long history in British academia, with scholars who have spent decades studying Korea's language, literature, history and culture. Still, I found myself wondering how far the enthusiasm for Korean popular culture has led people to explore the country's intellectual and historical traditions. Korea is more visible on the world stage than ever before. The challenge now is to deepen the understanding that lies behind that recognition.

The British Museum's exhibition offered at least part of an answer. Here were visitors pausing not for K-pop or K-beauty, but for ancient ornaments, Goryeo Buddhist art and Joseon landscapes. They were not simply consuming Korean culture; they wanted to understand the stories behind it. If the Korean Wave has made Korea familiar to audiences around the world, the next step is to give that familiarity greater historical depth and intellectual substance. As I left London, the image that stayed with me was of those visitors, quietly absorbed in Korea's past. In their attentive gaze, I saw new promise for Korean studies.

The author is an associate professor at the Institute of Korean Studies at Zhejiang University's School of History in China. The views expressed in this article are her own. She can be reached at mjyou700@gmail.com -- Ed.