Two Thousand Years of Home

# Two Thousand Years of Home

*On the British Museum's "Korea" exhibition — and what it means for those of us finding our way back*

This week, across the ocean in London, a door opened.

The British Museum unveiled *Korea* — its first major presentation of Korean art in more than forty years. One hundred masterpieces spanning two thousand years, drawn from the celebrated Lee Kun-Hee Collection, now fill the Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery. It runs through January 31, 2027.

I read the news and felt something catch in my chest. Let me tell you what's inside, and then let me tell you why it matters to us.

## What London is seeing

The exhibition gathers 100 works that trace the full arc of Korean creativity — from ancient bronze to contemporary vision. Among them: 10 National Treasures and 13 Treasures of Korea. More than twenty pieces are being shown outside Korea for the very first time, including bronze artifacts from Bisan-dong in Daegu, a celadon incense burner crowned with a girin, and modern landmarks like Nam June Paik's *Brahms*, Lee Jungseop's *Bound People*, and Park Rehyun's *Woman*.

The collection itself is a story of devotion. The late Samsung chairman Lee Kun-Hee spent decades gathering these works; in 2021, his family donated more than 23,000 of them to the Korean nation. This London showing follows acclaimed stops at the Smithsonian in Washington and the Art Institute of Chicago. At the opening gala, his son Jay Y. Lee said he hopes the exhibition "offers a gateway into Korean culture, spanning two thousand years of creativity and heritage, and that it will let everyone see Korea a little differently — for its beauty, its depth and its resilience."

A gateway. That word stayed with me.

## For those of us who came home late

If you are a Korean adoptee, you know what it is to love a culture you were separated from before you had words for it. You know the strange ache of recognizing yourself in a face, a food, a song — and the grief underneath it, for everything that should have been ordinary.

Most of us did not grow up with these objects. We did not walk past celadon in our grandmothers' houses. We did not learn the names of the dynasties the way other children learn nursery rhymes. Korean art history was never our homework; it was a locked room.

That is precisely why an exhibition like this is not just an art event for our community. It is a homecoming we get to choose. Standing before two thousand years of Korean making — the bronze workers, the kiln masters, the painters — is a way of saying: *this lineage is mine too. These hands are my inheritance.* Nobody can take that viewing away from us. It doesn't require permission, paperwork, or a reunion. It only asks that we show up and look.

Art was one of the first languages I ever trusted, and it has never once asked me to prove I belong. I built this foundation on the belief that culture, reclaimed on our own terms, can do what documents and DNA tests cannot: it can make us feel *held* by something older and larger than our individual stories.

## An invitation

If you are in or near London between now and January, go. Walk slowly. Let the celadon do its quiet work on you.

And if London is far — as it is for me in Maine — let this be a beginning anyway. Look up the works. Read about the girin on that incense burner. Sit with one image that stirs you and ask what it wakes up. Then tell someone. Tell us.

Two thousand years of beauty, depth, and resilience waited a long time to be seen this way. We have waited too. Maybe now we meet each other halfway.

— Mikki

*Founder, Ahn Ki Nam Charitable Foundation™*

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*Korea is at the British Museum's Joseph Hotung Great Court Gallery, October 1, 2026 – January 31, 2027.*