{"id":296584,"date":"2025-11-17T07:01:11","date_gmt":"2025-11-17T07:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/296584\/"},"modified":"2025-11-17T07:01:11","modified_gmt":"2025-11-17T07:01:11","slug":"south-koreas-latest-soft-power-export-samsung-billionaire-lee-kun-hees-art-collection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/296584\/","title":{"rendered":"South Korea\u2019s latest soft-power export? Samsung billionaire Lee Kun-hee\u2019s art collection"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n For more than seven decades, the family behind electronics giant Samsung amassed one of Asia\u2019s largest private art collections.\u202fNow, with thousands of its priceless works in public hands following the death of the conglomerate\u2019s chairman, the collection is being put to new use \u2014 as part of South Korea\u2019s \u201cK-culture<\/a>\u201d soft-power drive.\n <\/p>\n

\n More than 200 of the 23,000 objects gifted to the country<\/a> in 2021 by the late Lee Kun-hee\u2019s estate \u2014 thought to be part of a deal to settle an inheritance tax bill of over 12 trillion won ($8.2 billion) \u2014 are going on display at the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC this month.\n <\/p>\n

\n Spanning 1,500 years, the items selected by the Smithsonian\u2019s curators for \u201cKorean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared<\/a>\u201d give visitors a glimpse of the roots and evolution of Korea\u2019s modern identity, as well as the motivations of the notoriously private Lee family.\n <\/p>\n

\n The objects range from rare Buddhist sculptures and sacred texts to antique furniture and 20th-century paintings by pioneering artists like Lee Ungno and Kim Whanki, who curators say redefined Korean painting in a modernizing world.\n <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\n The Lee Kun-hee collection, which was started by its namesake\u2019s father, Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul, is unprecedented in its scope and scale. Almost all the 23,000 donated items went to the National Museum of Korea and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, whose curators collaborated with the Smithsonian for this exhibition. After the gift was announced, South Korea\u2019s government unveiled plans for an entire new museum<\/a> in Seoul to display the collection, which it hopes will \u201cstrengthen Korea\u2019s brand identity as a cultural powerhouse.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The Washington, DC exhibition includes several sections dedicated to Korea\u2019s last royal kingdom, the Joseon dynasty, which lasted from 1392 to 1910. Curators showcase the tastes and morals of the scholarly elite through court art and ceremonial objects, offering a look at the ideals, aesthetics and patronage systems that shaped Korean culture. The show also considers Buddhism and its legacy on the Korean peninsula, as well as modern artists\u2019 attempts to grapple with the Korean War<\/a> and monumental changes happening in the country and globally.\n <\/p>\n

\n Some items from the Washington, DC exhibition will also be displayed in Chicago and London next year amid growing global fascination with all things Korean, from K-beauty<\/a> to K-pop.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt is fantastic that Korea is making this global contribution to popular culture the way it is, but you know, Korean culture didn\u2019t start 10 or 15 years ago, right?\u201d said Chase F. Robinson, director of the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of Asian Art, over a video call. \u201cThere are deep, deep reservoirs or veins of, especially, Korean visual culture. This is an opportunity to see that in play.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The exhibition, Robinson added, will \u201cplay an important role in filling out that understanding, and (in) seeing some of those pre-modern traditions that feed into these millennia of creative dynamics.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The theme is particularly relevant given the growing size, influence and cultural power of Asian American communities in the United States, he said.\n <\/p>\n

\"Landscape<\/p>\n

\n Most of the objects are being exhibited outside of Korea for the first time, organizers said.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThat there is this heritage that is so multi-dimensional and so rich \u2014 to bring it all together and show the significance \u2014 I think is what is notable, remarkable,\u201d said Carol Huh, the museum\u2019s associate curator of contemporary Asian art, over a video call.\n <\/p>\n

\n Huh\u2019s interest and specialty is the work of 20th- and 21st-century artists who addressed modernization and a rapidly changing political landscape.\u202fIt is a period in which Korea, having had very little contact with the wider world for centuries, suddenly found itself being influenced by forces and trends far beyond its immediate neighbors.\n <\/p>\n

\n Within 100 years, the country went from being an imperial dynasty to a Japanese colony, to two independent states after the peninsula was divided into a Russian-controlled north and US-administered south after World War II. South Korea is now a liberal democracy, while the North is a totalitarian state run by Kim Jong Un.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThey were very much at the core of this complicated history of trying to understand what it is to be an artist in Korea,\u201d she said.\n <\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

\n Huh said the Lees\u2019 bequest fills a gap in the history of contemporary Korean art with work by nearly 300 20th-century artists included. It was, she added, a period of identifying and asserting distinctly Korean cultural forms.\n <\/p>\n

\n Among the Smithsonian\u2019s selection is work by artists like Kim Whanki, a well-known figure in the monochrome Dansaekhwa movement, whose members\u202f\u2014 having lived through Korea\u2019s liberation from Japan, a civil war and the military dictatorship \u2014 used abstraction to avoid explicit meaning in their images, partly out of fear of strict government censorship. Also featured is Lee Ungno and Park Saengkwang, part of the antithetical Minjung\u202fart (or \u201cthe people\u2019s\u201d art) movement, which sought to advance democracy and social justice in the 1970s and 1980s.\n <\/p>\n

\n The Lee family \u201cpresciently sought out modern paintings at a time when only a few paid attention to them,\u201d reads the exhibition catalog.\n <\/p>\n

\n Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul was partly motivated by the desire to repatriate art from Korean history. Many of the artifacts he acquired had, over the centuries, been sent abroad, lost or actively erased by the colonial Japanese government, which had even sought to outlaw the Korean language.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThe cultural heritage of our nation should no longer be scattered or lost abroad,\u201d he wrote in his autobiography.\n <\/p>\n

\n The Lees have made various gifts to museums across South Korea in recent decades. And even after its vast 2021 donation, the family retains a sizeable private collection, some of which is on display at the Samsung-run Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul, where the family continues its collecting legacy.\n <\/p>\n

\n Lee Kun-hee\u2019s art acquisitions were not without controversy: In 2007, he was accused by Kim Yong-chul, a former Samsung lawyer, of buying expensive artworks\u202fusing company slush funds. That accusation, which Lee denied, set off an investigation into the former chairman that saw him convicted of tax evasion in 2008 (though prosecutors never brought bribery charges relating to the alleged slush funds).\n <\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n

\n Like some of the artists in its collection, the Lee family also appeared to grapple with what it means to be Korean in a globalized era, and the collection gives glimpses into what the Lees, and their advisors, saw as part of Korean identity \u2014 and what they sought to project to the rest of the world.\n <\/p>\n

\n Lee Kun-hee is quoted in the exhibition catalog as saying: \u201cWhen Korean identity permeates our daily lives, we will gain cultural competitiveness on the world stage.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n His father, meanwhile, was known to write about how artworks excited him when he needed a spiritual lift, or would calm him down when he was excited or upset, said J. Keith Wilson, the Smithsonian\u2019s curator of ancient Chinese art.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cClearly, he had a very personal connection with Korean art of the past and was able to communicate with it in what seems to be like a spiritual way,\u201d Wilson added.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cKorean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared<\/a>\u201d is showing at the Smithsonian\u2019s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, DC through February 1, 2026.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For more than seven decades, the family behind electronics giant Samsung amassed one of Asia\u2019s largest private art…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,229,88],"class_list":{"0":"post-296584","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-design","12":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}