British Museum Korea Exhibition: 2,000 Years of Creativity From the Lee Kun-Hee Collection

The British Museum Korea exhibition does something London hasn’t seen in a generation. It puts two thousand years of Korean making in one gallery — gilt-bronze burial shoes, gold-and-silver sutras on indigo paper, a mountain painted just after rain — and asks you to read them as one long conversation, not a set of sealed periods. The show opened on 1 October 2026 in the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery and runs to 31 January 2027 (Samsung Newsroom).

It’s the museum’s first major special presentation of Korean art in more than 40 years, Samsung and the museum both say (Samsung Newsroom). The British Museum’s own season preview puts it more precisely: the broadest chronological span of Korean visual and material culture seen in Europe since Treasures from Korea: Art Through 5000 Years at the same museum in 1984 (British Museum).

Go slowly. The temptation is the sweep. The reward is the detail.

Lee Kun-Hee collection London stop, after Washington and Chicago

The Lee Kun-Hee collection London presentation is the European leg of a tour. It began in November 2025 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C., drawing about 80,000 visitors, then moved to the Art Institute of Chicago, drawing approximately 115,000, Samsung reported (Samsung Newsroom).

Almost everything on display comes from one bequest. In 2021 the family of the late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-Hee donated more than 23,000 works to the National Museum of Korea and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the British Museum says (British Museum). London gets 100 masterpieces, including 10 National Treasures and 13 Treasures, with more than twenty pieces shown internationally for the first time, Samsung reported (Samsung Newsroom). Among the first-timers: bronze artefacts from Bisan-dong, Daegu, bronze rattles, a celadon incense burner with a girin-shaped lid, plus Nam June Paik’s Brahms, Lee Jungseop’s Bound People and Park Rehyun’s Woman.

A Korean art exhibition 2000 years in the making, gallery by gallery

The museum’s curatorial introduction walks the Korean art exhibition 2000 years section by section, and it’s the best short guide to what you’ll actually stand in front of (British Museum).

Early rooms cover Silla wealth and Buddhist devotion: gilt-bronze burial shoes made for royalty around AD 400–600, and a gilt-bronze Bodhisattva triad from the 500s, designated a National Treasure and described as among the earliest surviving Korean Buddhist sculptures (British Museum).

Goryeo (918–1392) is the celadon chapter. Look for the inlay technique, sanggam — designs incised into unfired clay, filled with white or black slip, then sealed under glaze — in a 1100s bowl with a cloud-and-crane motif, a National Treasure (British Museum). Nearby, gold and silver sutra painting on indigo paper, made around 1341–67 as a prayer for a patron’s health, shows copying itself as an act of devotion.

Joseon (1392–1897) shifts to learning and kingship. Jeong Seon’s Clearing after rain on Mount Inwang (1751), painted at 75 and designated a National Treasure, turned landscape painting toward Korea’s own peaks — the museum calls it a landmark of ‘true-view’ painting, and notes Lee Kun-Hee prized it as one of his first joint acquisitions with his wife (British Museum). The eight-panel Chaekgado screens — scholars’ bookcases crowded over time with ceramics, antiques and imported curiosities — do something quieter: they show taste, wealth and collecting becoming subjects in themselves.

The last section refuses a tidy ending. Colonisation, division and war run through the 20th-century rooms. Lee Jungseop, separated from his family and unable to afford canvas, scratched Bound People into cigarette-pack foil in the 1950s (British Museum). Paik Namsoon’s Paradise (about 1936) fuses French Fauvist nudes with East Asian utopian peaks. The exhibition closes, in the museum’s account, with Suh Do Ho’s Self-portrait (2019) — a traditional Korean house drawn in thread, hovering over a lone figure: home as “burden and shelter, entrapment and protection.”

Korea exhibition tickets and highlights for planning a visit

Practical things first, for Korea exhibition tickets and highlights. Londontopia’s visitor guide lists the run in Room 35, the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery, with early-bird tickets from £14, under-16s free with a paying adult, and 2-for-1 student tickets on Fridays (Londontopia). It also flags two dates to plan around: the gallery closes on 1–2 December 2026 for a mid-run display rotation to protect light-sensitive works, with substitute pieces installed — the overall story, it says, won’t change. A free audio tour on selected highlights is available on the British Museum Audio app, and Sang-ah Kim’s companion book, Korea: 2,000 Years of Creativity, is published by British Museum Press in hardback at £40, Londontopia reported.

If you have an hour, not a day, spend it on three stops the sources keep returning to: the Jeong Seon mountain, the Goryeo celadon, and the Lee Jungseop foil. Gold first if you must choose a single room — the museum’s introduction opens there for a reason, and gold, as it puts it, “has always been the language of eternity” (British Museum).

What lingers isn’t the scale, though. It’s how often these objects were made to be used, prayed over, read, worn into a tomb or carried across a border — and how plainly the show lets that use stay visible, from a sutra copied stroke by stroke to a house carried in thread by an artist now living in London.

Sources

1. Samsung Newsroom — “Lee Kun-Hee Collection Expands to Europe With Opening of ‘Korea’ Exhibition at the British Museum” — 1 October 2026 — https://news.samsung.com/global/lee-kun-hee-collection-expands-to-europe-with-opening-of-korea-exhibition-at-the-british-museum
2. British Museum — “Introduction to ‘Korea'” — 2026 — https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/introduction-korea
3. British Museum — “What’s on at the British Museum in 2025/26?” — 2026 — https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/whats-on-british-museum-2025-26
4. Londontopia — “Korea: 2,000 Years of Creativity Comes to the British Museum” — 2026 — https://londontopia.net/london-events-news/special-exhibitions/korea-2000-years-of-creativity-comes-to-the-british-museum/