For the disabled, public art spaces remain largely out of reach amid accessibility limitations

Can Korea call itself a cultural powerhouse when some of its largest public art institutions have gone years without running a single program accessible to disabled visitors? Can the arts sector truly be considered democratic and inclusive when certain people are routinely left out?

A few years ago, Chung Young-seok — a wheelchair user who lectures and researches arts management — went to Museum SAN in Wonju with a friend, the very place where another wheelchair user was denied entrance in April this year. They tried to enter the James Turrell hall, which houses one of only a handful of Turrell installations in the world.

There was an elevator, but just as he was about to hop in, a staff member came over and told them they couldn’t ride it, without explaining why.

“I could understand if there were no facilities for the disabled at all,” Chung said. “But to be told I couldn’t use a facility that was already there — that felt like an entirely different problem. It made me realize this isn’t about whether facilities exist. It’s about how access is operated and how it’s understood.”

Museum SAN is, by Gangwon's official designation, a barrier-free tourist site — wheelchair rentals included.

The episode, which Chung recounted after last month’s incident that ignited a brief flurry of public attention, points to a broader conversation on accessibility that Korean arts institutions have not quite caught up to. The question is no longer whether ramps and elevators exist. They mostly do. The question is whether the access they imply actually works.

Law is there, but programs, less so

Korea has legally mandated accessibility at public buildings since 1998, when the Convenience Promotion Act was enacted, requiring public facilities to install ramps, accessible restrooms, tactile paving and similar fixtures. A barrier-free certification system, introduced in 2008, then layered a voluntary grading system on top of the act, evaluating buildings against more demanding criteria for everything from circulation paths to signage.

The Korea Disability Arts & Culture Center (KDAC) also administers a grant program that funds accessibility content and operations at public exhibition and performance spaces, with awards ranging from 50 million ($34,500) to 80 million won per institution for up to three years. This grant program has also expanded in the number of recipients, with six institutions receiving 500 million won in 2024 and 22 institutions receiving a total of 1.6 billion won this year.

The issue is that physical and programmatic accessibility move on separate tracks — one supported by the state, the other left to whatever budget an institution can find.

To get a sense of how this plays out, the Korea JoongAng Daily asked the country’s 20 largest art museums by visitor count to share their accessibility programming over the past five years, as well as their staffing levels.

Of the 20 surveyed, 13 museums responded, and among them, only six could point to more than one exhibition over the past five years that was designated barrier-free from the start. The rest reported accessibility measures bolted onto otherwise standard programming — a sign-language caption here, a tactile catalog there, a braille leaflet at the gate. The National Museum of Korea, Busan Museum of Art and Daelim Museum were among those that did not give responses.

The point isn’t to rank. The point is that institutions cannot agree on what counts as an accessibility program in the first place. Even accounting for differences in terminology and reporting methods, most institutions appeared to rely on exhibition-specific or auxiliary accessibility measures rather than long-term operational structures.

A 2024 survey by the Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture found that 64.5 percent of disabled residents in the city had not visited a cultural venue in the past year, against 23.9 percent of the general public — a gap that doesn’t show up in any single museum’s program count, but is the backdrop against which all of this is happening.

What ‘permanent’ actually means

A program count rises a little when you include reservation-only docent tours, ad hoc workshops attached to a single exhibition or a sign-language video uploaded once and never refreshed. Several institutions described their accessibility services as “permanent,” which, on closer questioning, meant they were available by phone reservation, only at certain galleries, only during certain hours, and only if a coordinator happened to be on duty.

Access existed. It was just rarely very open.

Jang Geun-young, who lives with mid-stage visual impairment and often visits museums, described what this feels like from the visitor’s perspective.

“When you listen to a docent, you can tell the script assumes you're looking at it,” Jang said. “The artist’s philosophy and intention get long, elaborate explanations, but the description of what's actually in front of me — what the work looks like — is often missing. Information is being delivered, but it doesn’t translate into experience.”

Another art lover, Son Ji-min, who is partially sighted, has her own elaborate workarounds — photographing works to enlarge them on her phone, going early to map the gallery, calling friends along.

“Most people see the overall composition first, but I don’t,” Son said. “The colors and shapes my eye lands on first are what I have to work with, and I piece things together fragment by fragment.”

What she actually wants — first, before any other piece of infrastructure — is human assistance.

“Not only at specifically barrier-free exhibitions but at any place, I want to be able to ask for help at a regular show, the way anyone else walks in,” Son said. “Asking for guidance shouldn’t feel like an unusual request.”

Jang described one of the larger national museums where the mobility-assist service technically existed but only operated inside specific galleries — “galleries 6 and 7,” she said — meaning a visually impaired visitor was expected to navigate the rest of the building unaided to reach the rooms where she could be helped.

The notice explaining how to call for assistance was posted at the entrance in text: useless if you couldn’t read it. She has asked for high-contrast signage at the museum since her first visit, years ago. They told her it would “not fit the design.”

“Going to an exhibition isn’t always something fun,” Jang said. “Sometimes it feels like homework.”

Why systems collapse operationally

The shortage isn’t equipment, but people.

Kim Do-young, who runs accessibility programming at Modu Art Space — the Seoul venue purpose-built around disability arts and barrier-free practice — said the issue she keeps running into is that good systems do not run themselves.

“Even when there’s good equipment, if there’s no one on site to operate it or explain it, it doesn't get used,” Kim said. “I’ve seen kits that were built but couldn’t really run because there was no one to manage them.”

Choi Jee-ah, who oversees exhibitions at Modu, pointed to the issue as a feedback problem.

“The facilities are there, but if very few disabled visitors actually come, no data gets generated,” Choi said. “The problem becomes harder to see, and improvement gets pushed down the list.”

Public museums have a structural disadvantage on top of all this: civil service rotations.

“Public institutions rotate staff often, so expertise doesn’t accumulate inside the institution,” said Kim Seon-hyung, a manager at KDAC. “With accessibility programs especially, when the person in charge changes, the thread breaks. Without institution-wide recognition that the work matters, it can’t be sustained.”

A comparison with Britain and the United States is useful less as scolding than as a structural contrast. In Britain, public arts institutions report on access to Arts Council England, with funding consequences for those that fall short. Larger American institutions employ in-house accessibility managers responsible for both physical and content accessibility across the entire operation.

“In Korea, the role isn’t even clearly defined yet,” Kim Seon-hyung said.

Nam So-young, chief director of the architectural planning firm About Place — which has worked on the Modu Art Space and Modu Theater accessibility projects — put it similarly.

“This isn’t a problem you solve in a year,” Nam said. “You need someone who can keep asking, what do we improve this year, what do we change next year. Right now, we don’t really have that role.”

Korea’s accessibility infrastructure is structurally downstream of project funding, individual managers’ interests and moments of public outcry — such as the Museum SAN incident. Where the work is sustained, it is usually because someone, somewhere, is personally invested. That is a fragile system. It is also the system Korea has.

Only for the seeing

What visitors described was not merely a lack of access to buildings, but a lack of access to interpretation itself. Past the entrances, past the elevators, past whether the audio guide works, what lies underneath is an idea and image of a visitor that has barely changed since talk of accessibility and barrier-free began.

The default museumgoer is sighted, ambulatory and quiet. Everything else is a deviation managed at the margins.

“Museums and public institutions tend to lump disability into a single category,” Chung said. “But visual impairment and physical disability are completely different, and within a single category, there’s enormous variation. If you try to solve everything with one standard, somebody is always going to be inconvenienced. Things designed for one person sometimes become an obstacle to another.”

Nam said barrier-free certification has shifted in her thinking from a “minimum standard” to something more like a starting point.

“The legal standard is built around the most representative cases, but actual disability is much more varied, and every space has its own conditions,” she said. “Meeting the standard doesn't automatically produce good accessibility.”

Nam’s example was almost embarrassingly simple. Most large cultural buildings have multiple entrances, but usually only one is accessible.

“The wheelchair user ends up only being able to use that one door,” Nam said. “It’s physically accessible, but the experience itself is still very segregated.”

The language used in front of artworks gives away the assumption that the art is only for the nondisabled, according to Son.

“Visually impaired visitors can’t just see the work and feel something,” Son said. “We need basic information first — what the material is, what the color is, what’s actually contained in it. Only then can appreciation begin. People say art is something everyone feels in their own way. But if there’s no information to feel from, you can’t feel anything.”

Older accessibility attempts often defaulted to placing a tactile model of the work’s outline next to the original — the shape, but nothing else.

“Each work has a different texture, different materials, different grain,” Son said. “I want to feel that too. But most efforts only try to communicate form.”

Nam mentioned a project Arko Art Center had run a while back — a written text map describing how to get to the museum, where the stairs were and where each entrance led. Arko is an old building; it cannot be made fully accessible without rebuilding it. The text map was an admission of that. It is no longer on the museum's website.

“Even if we can't change every space at once, just telling people clearly what the space is, in advance, can itself be a form of accessibility,” Nam said. “Accessibility isn’t really about giving someone special consideration. It’s about making it possible for anyone to understand and use a space.”

Whether Korea’s arts institutions believe that too is, at this point, the question.

BY LIM JEONG-WON [lim.jeongwon@joongang.co.kr]