The Chaebol Fortunes That Built South Korea’s Art World
The “Korean Wave” is the result of a complex entanglement of private and public forces shaped by unprecedented alignment between strategic government policy and ambitious mega-corporations that began integrating art and culture into their sprawling business ecosystems long before cultural patronage and corporate art became a standard component of ESG frameworks. For decades, South Korea made targeted public investments in its creative industries, across K-music, television and cinema and, increasingly, contemporary art, most often running alongside the promotion of Korean fashion, food, beauty and other consumer industries. Subsequently, Korean culture has become a global phenomenon, with stars such as BTS filling stadiums in the United States and Latin America and museums across the world mounting an expanding number of exhibitions centered on Korean art.
Revenues of the K-Content Industry reached KRW 165 trillion in 2025 (approximately $116.4 billion), up from KRW 151 trillion in 2024. As a result of this global popularity, tourism has also grown, with inbound visitors rising from 17.5 million in 2019 to a record of approximately 18.7 million in 2025. This year, tourism accelerated even further, with foreign arrivals surpassing 10 million by the third week of June and reaching 10.71 million in the first half of the year, up 21 percent year over year. While Seoul still leads the market, visitors are increasingly exploring regional hubs such as Busan and Jeju. Busan, for example, received nearly 1.94 million foreign visitors through May, with major K-pop events further accelerating the momentum as 110,000 people attended BTS’s two June concerts in the city. The K-pop craze remains a major driver of attraction, alongside a massive surge in medical tourism, particularly in dermatology and plastic surgery, and spending tied to the wider K-beauty economy.
South Korea’s postwar economic transformation was built around a developmental-state model in which government policy and a relatively small number of large business groups worked in tandem. The disposal of formerly Japanese-owned enterprises, relief funds, government-controlled foreign-currency allocations, preferential bank financing and U.S. economic assistance all contributed to the environment in which the chaebol developed. But it was also their ability to seek out opportunities arising from the tension and cooperation between state planning and private enterprise that allowed companies such as Samsung, Hyundai, LG and SK to build scale extraordinarily quickly. The ppalli-ppalli ethos served as a behavioral baseline that enabled these firms to build infrastructure rapidly, adapt to shifting international markets and commercialize products at speeds that often outpaced competitors. It is no coincidence that Korea’s development has also been described by the OECD as a “chaebol-led industrialization strategy.”
If public policy helped create the conditions for Korea’s global ascent—combining soft-power investments in cultural industries with duty-free shopping incentives and, most recently, more flexible entry policies, particularly targeting the Chinese market—the country’s corporations did much of the rest and continue to have an outsized impact in sustaining the country’s artistic and cultural infrastructure. These are the chaebol 재벌 (jaebeol), a term that in Korean combines “wealth” and “clan.”
Since the postwar period, the country has undergone extraordinarily rapid modernization and capitalization, following what is commonly described as the ppalli-ppalli (“quick-quick” or “hurry-hurry”) ethos, in which speed became integral to development. The symbiotic relationship between the chaebol and ppalli-ppalli culture served as one of the engines behind South Korea’s transformation from a war-torn nation into a global economic power—the so-called “Miracle on the Han River.”
What was unique about the chaebol model was that these groups typically consist of dozens of legally separate companies spanning unrelated sectors, while effective control has remained concentrated in a founding family, sometimes even when that family now owns only a relatively modest direct stake.
Samsung, for example, expanded far beyond electronics into insurance, construction, hotels, hospitals and other businesses. Hyundai moved across construction, automobiles, shipbuilding and finance. From the start, these Korean conglomerates functioned less as single entities than as entire economic ecosystems. Once a group became favored as an engine of national development, it could repeatedly enter new sectors and build capacity at an enormous scale while exerting a very real impact on society. The OECD has noted that the founding families of Korea’s largest business groups have historically maintained control through networks of affiliate shareholdings even as their direct ownership stakes have declined.
What is particularly interesting is how these families have also turned to art. Seoul today has more than 120 museums, many of them private. The chaebol model produced extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power while also creating dynasties accustomed to thinking institutionally and on an enormous scale. Once Korea’s industrial families entered the cultural sphere, they rarely bought art for social status or pleasure, but rather approached their involvement in art and culture with something resembling the same conglomerate model: they amassed collections, established foundations, commissioned architecture and built museums.
This is why much of the deeper infrastructure of South Korea’s art world still rests on private money—and particularly on the fortunes of the family-controlled conglomerates that have shaped the country’s economy for generations. Through collections, museums, foundations, commissions and international partnerships, families behind companies such as Samsung, LG and Amorepacific have transformed corporate wealth into cultural capital, often blurring the boundaries between philanthropy, dynastic prestige, national ambition and soft power.
One of the clearest examples is Samsung’s Lee family, which progressively transformed private collecting into museum infrastructure and eventually national patrimony through the Samsung Foundation of Culture, Leeum Museum of Art, Ho-Am Art Museum and the Lee Kun-hee Collection.
Since opening in 2004, Leeum, in particular, has rapidly established itself as one of Korea’s leading private museums, hosting ambitious exhibitions by major Korean and international contemporary artists such as Anicka Yi and Lee Bul, alongside its expansive collection spanning traditional Korean art and international modern and contemporary art in a complex of buildings by Mario Botta, Jean Nouvel and Rem Koolhaas/OMA. Meanwhile, following the death of Samsung’s late chairman Lee Kun-hee in October 2020, his family donated more than 23,000 works and cultural objects to museums across the country. The National Museum of Korea received 21,693 pieces of archaeological, historical and traditional cultural heritage, while the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) received 1,488 modern and contemporary works by both Korean and international artists, significantly reshaping the museum’s collection and its ability to represent the course of modern Korean art and its relationship with the world. Another 102 modern and contemporary works went to five regional museums.
Meanwhile, outside the country, the Samsung Foundation of Culture, through the Kun-Hee Lee Fund for Korean Art, supported the 1998 opening of a permanent gallery dedicated to Korean art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and later helped endow a permanent Korean-art curatorial position at the Met, the Korea Foundation and Samsung Foundation of Culture Curatorship for Korean Art. Samsung’s cultural philanthropy abroad has since expanded beyond Korean art and the support of other Korean exhibitions and programs, extending, for instance, to digital cultural education at the British Museum through the Samsung Digital Discovery Center.
Hyundai and the Chung family have similarly been extremely active in supporting Korean art and culture inside and outside the country, although the company has preferred to focus its efforts on major global institutional partnerships that enhance cultural visibility. Since 2015, the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale has been supported by Hyundai Motor, which has now extended that commitment through 2034. Yet Hyundai’s most prominent initiative abroad is arguably the Hyundai Commission for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, presenting both Korean and international artists. The relationship with Tate began in 2014 and has now been extended through 2036, while the Hyundai Tate Research Centre: Transnational has operated since 2019. In 2024, Hyundai also embarked on a 10-year partnership with the Whitney Museum, supporting the Whitney Biennial and the Hyundai Terrace Commission (the current commission by Kelly Akashi is on view through August 23). The company also supports programs, including the VH Award, other artist commissions and research initiatives through Hyundai Artlab.
The Suh family behind Amorepacific, one of the corporations that helped globalize K-beauty, has also been collecting for decades, eventually establishing the Pacific Museum in 1979 to house the collection assembled by the company’s founder, Suh Sung-whan. The museum became the Amorepacific Museum of Art, or APMA, in 2009 and reopened in 2018 with dedicated galleries within the company’s David Chipperfield-designed Yongsan headquarters, hosting major exhibitions by international artists, including Mark Bradford, while also drawing extensively on its own holdings of Korean antiquities and modern and contemporary art. A major Sol LeWitt exhibition, “Open Structure,” opens during Seoul Art Week and runs through February 28, 2027.
Then there is the Shin family behind the mixed commercial, luxury and urban-development ecosystem of the Lotte conglomerate, which incorporates its own LOTTE Museum of Art into the Lotte World Tower and the group’s wider retail developments. The museum has balanced international names with Korean ones and will soon open, in time for Frieze, a major exhibition devoted to Lee Kang So, one of Korea’s foremost contemporary artists, whose practice emerged from the experimental performance, installation and conceptual tendencies of the 1970s. “Lee Kang So: Emergence and Dissolution” opens August 21 and runs through November 1.
Doosan’s Park family also built an entire support ecosystem through the DOOSAN Yonkang Foundation. Their DOOSAN Art Center regularly hosts exhibitions in Seoul and organizes a series of educational programs and awards, including the DOOSAN Yonkang Arts Award, established in 2010 to support artists under 40, and the DOOSAN Curator Workshop, which selects three young curators every year for professional development and exhibition-making. DOOSAN Art Lab offers diverse forms of support for new experiments by artists in the visual arts under 35 and the performing arts under 40. From 2009 to 2021, the group also ran DOOSAN Residency New York, providing overseas experience and solo-exhibition opportunities to 64 artists. Since 2022, the program has moved to a more fluid format, operating through collaborations with established international institutions.
Another Park family is behind the Kumho Cultural Foundation, one of Korea’s longstanding corporate cultural foundations, which supports both visual artists and musicians through institutions such as the Kumho Museum of Art and the Kumho Art Hall. The visual art program began with the opening of the Kumho Gallery in Seoul in 1989; in 1996, it expanded and became the Kumho Museum of Art. The museum has long emphasized the discovery and support of younger artists through programs, including the Kumho Young Artist program, launched in 2005. Its activities extend beyond conventional contemporary-art exhibitions into architecture and design, alongside its permanent collecting and preservation work.
One of the most recent examples of corporate-led art-museum initiatives, however, is Centre Pompidou Hanwha, which opened on June 4 and is operated through the Hanwha Foundation of Culture in partnership with the Centre Pompidou. Occupying more than 10,000 square meters across four levels of Seoul’s landmark 63 Building, redesigned as a “box of light” by French architect Jean-Michel Wilmotte, it has become part of the Pompidou’s global “Constellation” expansion while its Paris home undergoes a multi-year renovation, also fostering cooperation and cultural exchange between the Korean and French scenes as the two countries celebrate the 140th anniversary of diplomatic relations. Behind it is the Kim family’s Hanwha Group, one of South Korea’s major chaebol, whose industrial roots trace back to Korea Explosives, founded in the early 1950s. The group has since expanded across defense, aerospace, energy, finance and retail. That background has also exposed the Pompidou partnership to criticism and accusations of artwashing connected to the conglomerate’s defense business. Last year, the Hanwha Foundation of Culture also opened Space ZeroOne in New York to support emerging and underrecognized artists, including Korean and Korean diasporic practitioners, and increase their international visibility.
Yet another recent addition to this complex, corporate-led art ecosystem is Paradise City, which shows how Korean corporations understand the benefits of integrating art into their business models at different levels. The hospitality and gaming group controlled by the Chun family has combined its passion for collecting into an experience-driven strategy in a multipurpose cultural-hospitality environment. Paradise Group is now led by Phillip Chun, the son of founder Chun Rak-won and himself a prominent collector. Paradise City, the sprawling resort complex that opened near Incheon International Airport in 2017, today features around 3,000 works of art across its hotels, restaurants and public spaces, with Korean and international artists represented throughout the complex. Paradise Art Space operates as its dedicated exhibition venue, while Paradise Art Night has become part of the Frieze-week calendar, bringing collectors, artists and art professionals to the Incheon complex despite the distance from central Seoul. From the beginning, Paradise City explicitly described itself as an “art-tainment” resort, embedding collecting and exhibition-making directly into hospitality and entertainment.
Meanwhile, LG is one of Korea’s “Big Four,” with roots in Lucky Chemical, founded by Koo In-hwoi in 1947 and initially associated with products such as the famous Lucky Cream before expanding into electronics, chemicals and, eventually, battery technology, under the control of the founding Koo family. Nonetheless, from early on, the Koo family was much less focused on building a canonical private collection and museum and much more invested in the corporate-sponsorship side, supporting existing cultural infrastructure and the performing arts, and then progressively focusing on art-and-technology partnerships more closely aligned with the company’s brand identity.
LG has its own LG Arts Center Seoul, a nonprofit performing arts center operated by the LG Yonam Cultural Foundation. The original LG Arts Center opened in Gangnam in 2000 before moving in 2022 into a major new complex in Magok designed by Tadao Ando.
Today, the company is increasingly focused on technology-driven institutional partnerships. Inside Korea, probably the most ambitious recent example is the MMCA×LG OLED Series, a long-term annual commission at MMCA Seoul devoted to artists working at the intersection of digital technology and contemporary art, which launched in 2025 with Korean artist TZUSOO. The series selects one artist each year to produce a new site-specific work for MMCA Seoul’s central Seoul Box space, with LG providing sponsorship and technological support.
Internationally, since 2022, the company has supported the LG Guggenheim Art and Technology Initiative, a five-year partnership dedicated specifically to artists working at the intersection of art and technology. Expanding beyond exhibition sponsorship, the initiative includes the LG Guggenheim Award, with the selected artist receiving an unrestricted honorarium of $100,000, alongside a dedicated curatorial position, research and public programming. Its latest awardee is Trevor Paglen, preceded by Ayoung Kim in 2025, Shu Lea Cheang in 2024 and Stephanie Dinkins in 2023. As part of the initiative, LG also sponsors the Guggenheim’s YCC Party through 2027, with LG OLED technology incorporated into artists’ activations of the Guggenheim’s landmark building during parties and events.
The overall dependence of the Korean art system on these corporate dynasties has arguably become more visible as that speculative energy that swept through the Korean art market during and immediately after the pandemic has disappeared. The influx of younger collectors that accompanied the boom—and helped create the conditions for Frieze Seoul’s arrival—has given way to a more calibrated market.
This follows a genuinely difficult stretch for the country in 2024-25, beginning with the political crisis triggered when President Yoon Suk Yeol declared martial law on December 3, 2024, followed by his impeachment, removal from office and, in February 2026, conviction for insurrection and a sentence of life imprisonment. The turmoil coincided with a sharp economic slowdown: South Korea’s GDP expanded only 1.0 percent in 2025, according to the OECD. Only recently has the Korean economy begun to recover, with political normalization following the June 2025 presidential election, fiscal support, recovering consumption and exceptionally strong semiconductor exports helping stabilize the export-driven economy.
At Frieze, dealers will be hoping to see that recovery translate into renewed confidence among a broader group of buyers, even if many already know that returning to Korea is worthwhile thanks to its institutions and the families behind them. If the art world initially came to Seoul to tap into a growing market, what has continued to give the Korean cultural industry its resilience and breadth is the strength of its museums and art spaces—many of which were underwritten by dynastic corporate capital and by families whose conglomerates are also helping drive the country’s economic rebound and shaping its next chapter.
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