Drawn largely from a Samsung chairman's bequest of 23,000 works, the British Museum's Korea show is the largest survey of Korean art seen in Europe in decades, to 31 January 2027.
Korean art fills Room 35 at The British Museum in Bloomsbury from Thursday 1 October 2026 to Sunday 31 January 2027. Europe has not seen a survey on this scale for over forty years.
Korea has made art for two thousand years, and the show spans the whole of it. Gold body ornaments and Buddhist icons from around 300BC come first.
Celadon-glazed stoneware from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries follows, once ranked by Chinese connoisseurs above their own kilns’ work. Ink landscapes and pieces made in response to the twentieth century’s upheavals close the survey.
Almost everything comes from the 23,000 works the Samsung chairman Lee Kun-Hee bequeathed to two Korean national museums on his death in 2021. It is one of the largest single gifts a private collector has made to any national museum.
Most of what is on display, from royal tombs and palaces, Buddhist temples and scholars’ studios, has never been shown in Britain. Many objects carry Korea’s own National Treasure designation.
Among them are a gilt-bronze Avalokiteshvara holding a ritual water vessel and a gourd-shaped celadon ewer cut with chrysanthemums. The six-panel Sun, Moon and Five Peaks screen once stood behind the Joseon throne.