Walk into Seoul’s gleaming Leeum Museum of Art, and you might assume you’re in a state-funded national institution. But the museum—home to ancient Korean ceramics, contemporary installations, and works by major international artists—is owned and operated by the Samsung Foundation of Culture, Samsung’s cultural arm. Across the city, Hyundai and LG run cultural institutions as well.
At London’s Tate Modern, one of the world’s most visited art spaces, a longstanding partnership with Hyundai provides visibility that elevates both the corporation and Korean contemporary art.
When these companies donate art collections, sponsor exhibitions, or open world-class art spaces, they’re making strategic moves in a global competition for cultural influence. It’s a phenomenon that art history professors Sunglim Kim and Chad Elias began investigating last year through an Arts Integration grant—Dartmouth funding designed to foster deep interdisciplinary work that bridges traditional academic boundaries.
“There’s a deliberate, systematic effort by the Korean state and by major corporations to build what scholars call ‘soft power’—the ability to shape how the world perceives Korea,” says Kim.
“Soft power is the ability to shape the preferences of others through persuasion and legitimacy,” Elias explains, “rather than through military force or economic pressure.”
South Korea’s soft power success is rooted in its cultural exports—notably K-pop, film, fashion, and cosmetics—which have captivated global audiences. Termed the “Korean Wave” or Hallyu, this cultural phenomenon has been actively supported by government policies that recognize the strategic value of cultural diplomacy.
What makes Korea’s moment in the visual arts distinctive, Kim and Elias discovered, is the degree to which corporations have become the primary drivers of cultural export, with family-controlled corporate conglomerates—called chaebol in Korean—doing the heavy lifting.
Alice Kim ’27 and Chad Elias speak with Jang-Uk Lee, curator of Space K Soul, a nonprofit contemporary art museum operated by the Kolon Group.
When Kim approached Elias about applying for the Arts Integration grant, she had a clear vision: examine how contemporary Korean art acquires both symbolic and economic value on the global stage.
“We wanted to understand how contemporary art from Korea gets exported,” Elias says. “What is the role of these corporations in funding and sponsoring contemporary art exhibitions, contemporary art residencies, building private collections, and donating to public museums?”
Elias specializes in contemporary art, cultural economics, and the global art market—the mechanisms, incentives, and power structures that determine which artists rise to prominence. Kim, a member of the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages, brings expertise in pre-modern East Asian art history alongside intimate knowledge of contemporary Korean culture, having previously worked as an assistant curator at the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. (A recognized authority on Korean art, she is frequently sought by the media for expert commentary.)
The resulting research project moves fluidly across Seoul’s corporate culture foundations, New York’s Frieze Art Fair, artist studios, and auction houses, mapping how Korean corporations are shaping Korea’s global image.
From Seoul to New York City
Working with Mecenat, an organization that facilitates corporate support for the arts, Kim and Elias visited corporate culture foundations not only in Seoul but also in regional cultural hubs including Busan, Yeosu, and Jeju. They met with artists in their studios, interviewed private collectors and gallery directors, and engaged with government organizations. At New York’s Frieze Art Fair, they interviewed gallery owners about marketing contemporary Korean art to global audiences.
“Through interviews with key figures in New York and Seoul, we aimed to uncover how cultural narratives and market forces shape one another within the art world,” Elias says.
Left to right: Emma Shin, Alice Kim ’27, Chad Elias, Park Chanjong (team manager, Doosan Yonkang Foundation), Sunglim Kim, and Branden Song ’27 visit the Doosan Yonkang Foundation, a public cultural and academic foundation under the Doosan Group.
Among the artists they visited was Choe U-Ram, whose mechanically engineered sculptures combine electronics and mechanical engineering; photographer Jung Yeondoo, who documents different subcultures and layers of Korean society; and Kyungah Ham, whose woven fabrics are produced by North Korean artisans—work that literally embodies the tensions across the divided peninsula.
They also visited POSCO, a steel production company valued in the billions of dollars. When they spoke with the head of its cultural wing, they learned something unexpected. Rather than simply creating a museum of elite art, POSCO created public artworks driven by community involvement in its factory towns, using art as social infrastructure that brings people together.
For Alice Kim ’27, who grew up in Korea and worked as a research assistant to Kim and Elias, the fieldwork revealed unexpected complexity.
“I grew up taking for granted the outsized role that large conglomerates play in shaping the country’s visual arts and cultural institutions,” Kim says. “This experience helped me approach this familiar landscape academically and see cultural patronage not simply as branding or philanthropy, but as a complex and negotiated relationship among artists, institutions, and corporate actors.”
Left to right: Alice Kim ’27, Chad Elias, Sunglim Kim, and Higgin Kim, chair of Byucksan Engineering and Construction Company and an art collector, at Kim’s home
Blurring public good and private power
Kim and Elias discovered that major corporations like Samsung, Hyundai, LG, and Amorepacific have strengthened Korea’s cultural infrastructure by funding museums, research centers, residency programs, and exhibition spaces that the state alone could not have built. This corporate patronage has extended beyond institutional walls, expanding public access to culture through exhibitions, educational programs, and large-scale outreach initiatives that bring diverse audiences into contact with art.
But this philanthropic boom comes with hidden costs.
“Corporate patronage delivers real cultural gains but it also blurs the line between public good and private power,” Elias says. “Companies like Samsung, Hyundai, and Amorepacific receive significant tax benefits for cultural donations, allowing chaebol families to convert private assets into public gifts. These museums and foundations also concentrate elite influence: they shape national art narratives and dominate major exhibitions with resources that far exceed those of public institutions.”
The Samsung case study illustrates the stakes vividly. When Samsung’s patriarch Lee Kun-hee died in 2020, his family faced an inheritance tax bill of nearly $11 billion, one of the largest in South Korean history. In response, the Lee family announced they would donate 23,000 artworks to Korean public institutions—works by Picasso, Monet, and Dalí, alongside an extraordinary range of Korean historical and contemporary pieces.
Kim experienced the donation’s global reach firsthand in January at the “Korean Treasures” exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. The first U.S. showcase of masterpieces from Kun-hee’s collection drew more than 65,000 visitors.
Sunglim Kim, Sunwoo Hwang, assistant curator of Korean art and culture at the National Museum of Asian Art, and Jinyoung Jin, director of the Charles B. Wang Center at Stony Brook University, attend “Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared” at the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C.
Significantly, Korea recently changed its tax law to allow artworks to be used as payment for inheritance taxes. Now, cultural assets can discharge tax liabilities under certain conditions.
“The family gets to preserve their collection’s integrity—rather than seeing it dispersed at auction—while also settling a massive tax bill,” Elias says. “There are real cultural benefits. But there’s also a concentration of power.”
As funding for the arts dries up in many American cultural institutions, Kim and Elias’ research offers a counterintuitive lesson. South Korea has created a model in which corporate patronage, despite its complications, has dramatically strengthened the cultural infrastructure.
But Kim and Elias document the dangers: tax avoidance schemes, the concentration of elite influence, and the potential for governments to use corporate patronage as an excuse to cut public funding.
“It’s part of a wider problem we’re seeing in the developed world,” Elias says, “where taxation systems are increasingly set up to incentivize private individuals and corporations to sponsor the arts—and this can be manipulated.”
Strengthening Asian studies at Dartmouth
Kim and Elias are preparing an article for a peer-reviewed journal and planning to expand their geographic scope to include Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. They’re also exploring editing a volume that would fill a significant gap in scholarship on corporate art patronage in the region.
Their research arrives at a pivotal moment for Korean studies at Dartmouth. This fall, the Department of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages launched a Korean language program—the capstone to what has become a robust Korean studies curriculum that already includes courses on Korean history, art, and culture, alongside a thriving student exchange program with Yonsei University in Seoul.
This spring, Kim will launch a new course titled Art, Business, and Soft Power in Asia, cross-listed between Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages and Art History. The course is one of Asian Societies, Cultures, and Languages’ newly created “Business in Asia” courses, where students study key business-related topics—labor, money, wealth, and globalization—from liberal arts perspectives.
“Understanding how Korea is projecting soft power through culture—how corporations, the state, and artists are reshaping global perceptions of Korea—that’s essential knowledge for students who want to understand the 21st-century world,” Kim says.