British Museum Opens First Major Korean Art Show in 42 Years

The British Museum opened its first major Korean art show in 42 years, featuring 100 works including 10 National Treasures.

The British Museum opened "Korea: 2,000 Years of Creativity" on October 1, 2026, in the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery, and multiple outlets agree on why it matters: Pulse by Maeil Business News Korea reports it is the first large-scale special exhibition of Korean art at the British Museum in 42 years, while Samsung Global Newsroom calls it the first major special presentation of Korean art there in more than 40 years. The show runs through January 31, 2027, and the gala dinner on September 30 drew about 240 guests, including Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal, Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey, and Samsung Electronics Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee with his family.

Most of the works come from the bequest of the late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-Hee, whose family spent three generations building the collection, according to Samsung Global Newsroom. The exhibition draws on more than 23,000 artworks donated as a national bequest in 2021 and is organised jointly by the British Museum, the National Museum of Korea, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea. Euronews reports the show includes ten works carrying official Korean national treasure designations, with most exhibits drawn from Lee Kun-Hee's collection.

The London presentation features 100 masterpieces, including 10 National Treasures and 13 Treasures of Korea, with more than twenty pieces shown internationally for the first time, Samsung Global Newsroom reports. Among the debuts are the National Treasures "Bronze Artifacts from Bisan-dong, Daegu" and "Bronze Rattles," plus the "Celadon Incense Burner with Girin-shaped Lid." Modern and contemporary works by Nam June Paik ("Brahms"), Lee Jungseop ("Bound People"), and Park Rehyun ("Woman") also appear for the first time, spanning two millennia of Korean art in one narrative.

The tour's reception is itself the story fans would talk about. Pulse reports the two previous U.S. stops drew a combined 195,000 visitors: about 80,000 at Washington D.C.'s Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, making it that museum's most-visited special exhibition of the past decade, and about 115,000 at the Art Institute of Chicago. Samsung Global Newsroom gives the same figures. With K-culture enjoying global recognition, as Korea's Ambassador to the U.K.

For devoted readers, the significance is representational: a European institution dedicating its Great Court Gallery to a unified 2,000-year narrative of Korean art, not a fragment of it. Executive Chairman Jay Y. Lee said at the gala, according to Samsung Global Newsroom, that he hopes the exhibition will "let everyone see Korea a little differently — for its beauty, its depth and its resilience." British Museum chair George Osborne framed the collection as helping audiences understand the past and, in his words to Pulse, serve as "a compass for looking toward the future."

Samsung Global Newsroom notes the Lee family's collecting legacy spans founder Lee Byung-Chull, Chairman Lee Kun-Hee, and Leeum Museum of Art Director Emerita Hong Ra-Hee, who expanded the collection across ancient and modern works. At the opening gala, Executive Chairman Lee also honored three Korean War veterans in attendance and thanked Princess Anne for her July 2026 visit to the United Nations Memorial Cemetery in Busan, tying the show to more than 140 years of Korea–U.K. ties.