National Museum of Korea tries to restore its damaged reputation

“It is said that few museums have failed with Egypt exhibition.”

Kim Yeong-na, director of National Museum of Korea, said at a recently-held press conference about “Egypt exhibition” on which the museum is giving the major focus this year. Ancient civilization of Egypt has always enjoyed so much public attention that it has frequently been the subject for Hollywood movies. It means that the same could apply to museum exhibition as well. Some criticize, however, that it is not desirable for a national museum, cradle of the nation’s cultural assets, to focus more on the display of other nation’s cultural assets.

It’s not that simple issue for National Museum of Korea whose critical performance index is the number of visitors. In 2015, the museum showed poor performance in attracting visitors. According to the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, a total of 2.29 million people came to the museum from January to September in 2015, a decrease of 18.4 percent year-on-year.

To make matters worse, the museum’s special exhibition named “Masterpieces of Early Buddhist Sculpture, 100 BCE-700 CE” that it had passionately organized in commemoration of museum’s 10th anniversary, stopped short of attracting merely 38,220 visitors for two months. On the other hand, “The Story of Bohemian Glass,” another special exhibition that had approximately same display period attracted 99,413 museum goers. It means that the main display that included Buddhism sculptures of Korea and Asian nations received much poorer record card than an exhibition that was planned to celebrate the 25th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Korea and the Czech Republic.

It is true that Buddhism sculptures are not a popular subject to the general public but the museum lacked efforts to organize the exhibition at eye level of the general public. “Many parts of display at Masterpieces of Early Buddhist Sculpture were difficult for visitors to understand. There weren’t even basic explanations why those sculptures were displayed there, making even experts tilt their head," sources of the museum sector said.

On the other hand, a special exhibition “Babsangjigyo; Exchange of food culture on the table,” which opened in December last year by the National Folk Museum of Korea has attracted some 300,000 peoples within only 40 days by displaying unique items such as video display in a ramen bowls. “More aggressive efforts such as providing more viewer-friendly explanation are required,” said Professor Jeong Woo-taek, director of Dongguk University Museum.

김상운 기자sukim@donga.com