A collection of photographs donated by late artist Do Sang-bong (Leeum Museum of Art)

Visitors to the Leeum Museum of Art, Korea's largest private museum run by the Samsung Foundation of Culture, can now view previously private archives on Korean art and the history of the museum, either at the museum by reservation or digitally via its website.

The archives are divided into two sections -- Museum Archive and Art Archive -- and encompass some 86,000 items. The museum’s archive collection began in 1998 with some 40,000 items donated by Korea’s first-generation art critic and journalist, Yi Ku-yol, and 45,000 items from some 160 Korean contemporary and modern artists, such as To Sang-bong and Choi Wook-kyung.

The Art Archive features materials that provide insights into the currents of pre-1950 art while the Museum Archive preserves records of exhibitions held at Hoam Museum of Art, Hoam Gallery, Rodin Gallery, Platue and Leeum Museum of Art, including the 1982 inaugural exhibition at Hoam Museum of Art with English sculptor Henry Moore’s works.

A catalog the Henry Moore exhibition, the inaugural show at Hoam Museum of Art in 1982 (Leeum Museum of Art)

A large part of Yi Ku-yol’s donated archives are rare materials from an art magazine first issued in September 1947, following the liberation from the Japanese colonial era (1910-1945). Among the archives are a catalog of the late Kim Whan-ki’s retrospective after the Sao Paulo Art Biennale in 1975, as well as a dossier detailing the late Park Soo-keun’s interactions with foreign national patrons, facilitated by Korea’s first commercial gallery, Bando Hwa-rang.

Hoam Museum of Art is showing “Nicolas Party, Dust,” running until Jan. 18, 2025 while the Leeum Museum of Art is showing exhibitions “Anicka Lee: There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One,” and “2024 Art Spectrum Dream Screen,” both running through Dec. 29. The museum is closed on Mondays.

The physical archives can be viewed at the museum’s reading room after making a reservation in advance. The digitized archives are accessible only in Korea.