[Editorial] Hopes for the New National Museum of Korea

A national museum represents its country's pride and majesty. It holds a nation's desires and ideals, aesthetic consciousness and worldview, the values and lifestyles it pursues, and memories of glory and pain. That is why national museums are not only about the past. They function also as places that open up a new future through continuous dialogue with present realities.

Korea's national museum, however, opened the year of Liberation but in the sixty years since has been forced to move from one place to the other for lack of its own home. It has had to pack up its bags and move six times, making it impossible to hope for state grandeur and national pride.

On Friday the national museum reopens in its "new home" in Seoul's Yongsangu. It is a joyous occasion for the whole nation. They say it is the sixth largest in the world and the largest in Asia, and that instead of being a simple artifact display it has areas where you can experience, feel, and contemplate history, so it looks like you will finally be able to display the pride that had been in such bad shape for so long. The work that now remains is that of making it a museum that is placed well within the daily lives of the people, and a place where the past and the present come together naturally and visitors seek a new future.

However, there is something about having a decent national museum that makes you feel all the more at a loss about something else, namely the way Korean cultural artifacts have been taken overseas. Currently there are believed to be 74,434 Korean relics in around 20 countries. If you include those in private possession the number goes way over 100,000. Many are fine cultural articles that were stolen out of the country, such as the Suwol Gwaneum Bosal Do, the Mongyu Dowon Do, and the Jikji Simche Yojeol. Those articles need to be recovered or at least be put on exhibition in Korea. China recently spent W1.04 billion recovering two stone Buddha heads stolen 100 years ago. You envy that because they say it was the active and combined work of the Chinese government and private concerns.

The Hankyoreh, 28 October 2005.

[Translations by Seoul Selection]