Two millennia of K-history: hard to remember, hard to forget
Photo: Korea exhibition © The Trustees of the British Museum
Daniel Nelson
The treasures displayed in the mini-Korea blockbuster at the British Museum — moon jars, a lacquer box, ancient texts, temple bells, the famous The Tiger and The Magpie painting — are predictably and indescribably superb, so no need to add my praise. But the modern works, though less classically beautiful, are worth looking at too.
It’s hard to remember how poor Korea was, and hard to forget how rich it is now, and how 20th century colonisation, war, division, oppression and political upheaval nave morphed into K-pop and K-culture generally.
A man adrift in a boat reaches across the water to a woman and two children in a painting by an artist separated by war and poverty from his family, an image that the caption says “resounded with millions who had lost loved ones in the Korean War”. Few Brits are even aware of that conflict, and its intensity, even though it involved British troops.
The 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a military massacre that is also little known in the UK, is remembered in a large sculpture of contorted bodies, though hope comes from an embracing couple at the top of the tortuous pile.
The 1980 Gwangju Uprising, a military massacre that is also little known in the UK, is remembered in a large sculpture of contorted bodies, though hope comes from an embracing couple at the top of the tortuous pile.
Perhaps the hope and striving for balance harks back to the longevity of Korean dynasties and of the Buddhist past, which provided such nurturing ground for 2,000 years of art.
Some of the small selection of 21st century works seem anodyne or even forced, like the painting of a woman in a red dress who shares a frame with a moon jar, perhaps, with celadon ware (“the finest under heaven”), the most famous of Korean porcelain.
More determinedly contemporary is a work by the pioneer widely considered to be the founder of video art, Nam June Paik, who chooses a target new to Korean art: to build bridges between art and technology.
One of the most striking modern works ends the exhibition, a self-portrait by London resident Suh Do Ho, which shows a tiny figure below a curtain of brilliantly coloured threads topped by a floating traditional Korean house. Lead curator Sang-ah Kim describes it somewhat optimistically as “a fitting place to end: a Korean artist, living abroad, threading his heritage into something new. Not a closed chapter, but a conversation unfolding.”
But while there are a few historical facts about Korean dynasties and, for example, the development an ancient king’s new writing system, “brilliant in its simplicity, [which] opened literacy to all”, the exhibition remains a delicious display of individual objects, rather than a thorough insight into an extraordinary, magnificent 2,000-year culture.
But what treasures, what imagination, what skill, what beauty.
Korea, is at the British Museum, Great Russell Street WC1, from £18, 1 October - 31 January. Info: Korea