Beyond Hallyu: Two Thousand Years of Korean Art

For many European visitors, Korea is the country of Parasite, television dramas, K-pop and digital platforms. The British Museum has chosen to start from a different perspective. From 1 October 2026, the London institution will host Korea, its first major exhibition devoted to Korean history and art in more than forty years. The choice is no coincidence. In recent years, the so-called Hallyu, or Korean Wave, has transformed the country's international image. Film, music, television and technology have made familiar a cultural landscape that, until a few decades ago, remained relatively peripheral in the Western imagination. Rather than focusing on this recent global success, the exhibition looks further back, tracing more than two thousand years of Korean cultural history, from 300 BC to the present day. The exhibition brings together works from the National Museum of Korea, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art and the British Museum's own collections. Its core, however, comes from the renowned Collection of Lee Kun-hee, the businessman who led Samsung and whose family donated more than 23.000 artworks and artefacts to the Korean state in 2021. It was one of the most significant cultural donations in recent Asian history and has since become the focus of an international tour that has already travelled to Washington and Chicago before arriving in London. The exhibition spans widely different periods and artistic traditions. From ancient goldwork and Goryeo celadon ceramics to Buddhist paintings, objects associated with the Confucian culture of the Joseon Dynasty, and works from the twentieth century and the contemporary era. Alongside ritual artefacts and objects created for royal courts are works by modern artists such as Nam June Paik, a central figure in the emergence of video art. The exhibition opens at a moment of growing international visibility for Korean cultural institutions. Today, the National Museum of Korea ranks among the world's most visited museums, while Seoul has established itself as one of Asia's leading cultural centres, playing an increasingly important role in the global art market.