Museum meshworks

: Representing "Korea" through art, craft, and design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (1980-2004)

Abstract

This thesis investigates the range of people, things, and ideas that shaped the collection and display of Korean art, craft, and design at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1980 to 2004, spotlighting in particular South Korean contributions to museum work. From the 1980s, the South Korean government and state-affiliated museums, as well as private collectors, individual makers (artists, designers, and craftspeople), academics, gallery and businessowners, and others from South Korea increasingly engaged with museum colleagues in the UK (and beyond) on initiatives that involved international representations of Korean material and visual culture. Approached in this study as a form of collaborative work, though not without hierarchies, these interactions unfolded within broader contexts of transformation and change, including the Cold War and processes of nation-building, internationalisation, and cross-cultural exchange that often centred ideas of “Korean traditional” and “Koreanness”. Drawing on archival evidence and oral history methodologies, the research offers new understandings of the exchanges that took place via exploring diverse modes of relationality, encompassing the social, material, and conceptual. The work is supported by meshwork theory, and further articulated through the concepts of correspondences, collaboration and co-production, and friction to tease out the complex nature of transnational and cross-cultural engagement.
Anchored by a decolonial approach, this study underscores the South Korean presence and influence in international museum practice, perspectives that are largely overlooked in both the formal archive and in official institutional histories. The research, thus, contributes to the growing contemporary discourse about museum decolonisation, which, in part, entails readdressing gaps, silences, omissions, and marginalisation in (historic and current) museum practice. Attention is also drawn to South Korean making (art, craft, and design) histories, which are examined through an intersectional lens, narratives that have received limited consideration in the fields of international design history and critical museum studies. In centring the contributions of South Korean collaborators on acquisitions and display processes at the Victoria and Albert Museum, this thesis not only brings to light hierarchies of relations that can underpin co-production within and beyond the museum, but, additionally, reveals hidden or invisible forms of labour, alongside the agency and agendas of different museum participants. The research, consequently, reflects a nuanced institutional history, one that is shaped by numerous international collaborators over time as much as it is by “the museum”.

Date of Award	Feb 2026
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton
Supervisor	Yunah Lee (Supervisor), Dr Rosalie Kim (Supervisor) & Claire Wintle (Supervisor)