For decades, one of the world’s most his- torically significant collections of Korean art has been kept largely out of public view, quietly assembled by South Korea’s richest family: Samsung’s found- ing patriarch, the Lee family.
Now, the works are on their first-ever overseas tour, riding a global wave of interest in Korean culture that extends well beyond pop music and film into the country’s deepest artistic traditions.
Called Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared, more than 200 works from the late Samsung Chairman Lee Kun-hee’s vast art collection opened for viewing at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington in November. Jointly organised by South Korea’s National Museum of Korea and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, the exhibition will be travelling to Chicago in March and London’s British Museum in September.
The art pieces span roughly 1,500 years of Korean history, from Goryeo dynasty celadon to Joseon-era treasures and notable paintings by famed modern artist Kim Whan-ki. Lee’s private collec- tion, which was donated to the state in 2021 at a time when the Samsung family revealed inheritance plans, encompassed more than 23,000 pieces.
Experts esti- mated the collection had an appraised value of between 2 trillion won ($1.4 billion) and 3 trillion won when it was donated, while market value could be around 10 trillion won. The overseas tour comes as Korean cul- ture is gaining unprecedented global visibility. Netflix’s KPop Demon Hunters has drawn huge interna- tional audiences by weaving Korean folklore and traditional imagery into a modern pop narrative.
K- pop band BTS has announced their return with an album titled Arirang, referencing the cen- turies-old folk song often described as Korea’s unofficial national anthem. “Memory and history are important to Koreans,” Samsung Electronics Execu- tive Chairman Jay Y.
Lee said at a gala event in Washington. “Despite the hard- ships of colonial rule and the Korean War, my father and grandfather believed it was their duty to safeguard the future of our culture.”
For much of the 20th century, the Korean Peninsula’s cultural heritage was damaged or dispersed, first under Japanese colonial rule and later during decades of authoritarian rule that priori- tised industrial growth over preservation. Samsung’s involvement in cultural patronage dates back to founder Lee Byung-chull, who established the Sam- sung Cultural Foundation to recover lost cultural assets.
“As I grew older, a sense of duty — to ensure that our national cul- tural heritage would no longer be lost overseas — increasingly led me down the path of collecting art,” Lee Byung-chull wrote in his memoir Ho-Am. That philosophy shaped Lee Kun- hee’s collecting, which later became the foundation of Seoul’s Leeum Museum of Art. The collection will eventually have a permanent public home. The country’s culture ministry plans to open the Lee Kun-hee Art Museum near Gyeongbok- gung Palace in central Seoul in 2029.
