British Museum Korea: Beauty Dazzles, Then Falls Apart — SkimNews
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- The British Museum's 'Korea' exhibition surveys 2,000 years of Korean art, with most pieces drawn from the collection of Lee Kun-hee, the late Samsung chair who died in 2020 and is named as the exhibition's 'corporate partner.'
- Ancient highlights include an 8th-century bronze Buddhist bell, Goryeo-era celadon (918–1392) and an 18th-century moon jar prized for its imperfect join — works the reviewer labels a 'nirvana of beauty.'
- The 20th-century section is described as a 'lurch,' mixing pastiches and European-style modernism while scarcely addressing Japan's 1910–1945 colonisation of Korea.
- The Korean War, which killed three million people, surfaces mainly through pastels by Lee Jung-seop — a wartime migrant who died before ever seeing his family again.
- Do Ho Suh's 2019 self-portrait closes the show, depicting the artist as a tiny figure beneath multicoloured threads streaming from a floating image of a traditional Korean house.
- The reviewer argues the Lee Kun-hee collection skews the blockbuster toward elite art, questioning whether it can stand as an 'objective history of a people's art and beliefs.'
Why it matters: The British Museum's choice to anchor a flagship Korean cultural history on one private collector's elite acquisitions — without fuller engagement with Japan's 1910–1945 colonisation or the three-million-dead Korean War — means a major public exhibition shapes visitors' understanding of Korea with documented blind spots on modern trauma.
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