National Museum’s renovated Korean Empire Gallery reclaims forgotten history of maligned kingdom

The Korean Empire Gallery at the National Museum of Korea reopened after a nine-month-long renovation on Thursday, rebuilt around the argument that the empire’s 13 years were an active bid for modern sovereignty and not the closing page of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910).

The gallery room is small — 123 square meters on the first floor of the permanent galleries — and it covers 13 years, from the proclamation of the Korean Empire in 1897 to the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910. The gallery has been dark since last autumn, when the space was folded into the Yi Sun-shin special exhibition that drew 407,045 visitors, the largest attendance in the museum’s history.

Sixty-five objects are on view, seven of them designated Treasures, with loans from Kyujanggak, the royal library, the Jangseogak archives and the Independence Hall of Korea. Two of the 65 have never been shown publicly: a bronze ridge-beam inscription and a silver cornerstone plate, both recovered in 1996 when the Japanese Government-General building was demolished, both engraved with the names of the men who put it up. They had been in storage for 30 years.

“We are not exhibiting these to commemorate the Government-General building,” said Seo Yoon-hee, the curator who led the renovation, during a press conference at the museum on Thursday. “We brought it out because the history of Japanese aggression has to be remembered. A people who forget their history have no future — this is history that must never be forgotten.”

Other pieces are ones the National Museum of Korea has held all along but rarely brings out. The portrait of Emperor Gojong attributed to Chae Yong-sin, painted in 1902 for the 40th anniversary of his accession and his 51st birthday, is on view for the first time in seven years. So is the Denny Taegukgi, the oldest and largest surviving Korean flag, and Ahn Jung-geun’s calligraphy from 1910. A map of the capital of Seoul, then known as Hanseong, from 1902, marks the foreign embassies ringed around Gyeongbok Palace.

“What this exhibition wants to say is that the Korean Empire was not merely the last page of the Joseon dynasty,” said Seo. “It was a 13-year journey of trying, on its own, to become a modern state.”

The room has been staged rather than filled. Exhibition designer Kang Jin-yung worked from two motifs: the oyatkkot, the plum blossom that served as the imperial crest, and Seokjojeon, the neoclassical hall at Deoksu Palace, whose arches and moldings are reproduced in the walls. Visitors come in through an arch and a transparent OLED panel on which an electric lamp dissolves into the crest.

“The Korean Empire Gallery is a comparatively small exhibition space,” said Kang. "So we used video actively, as part of the spatial design. We placed the video content at the points where the visitor's gaze settles, to expand a limited space into a richer experience."

Five films run through the room, using transparent OLED, AI-processed footage and a curved screen. The Denny flag comes last.

"The Denny Taegukgi is the national symbol of the Korean Empire and a symbol of patriotism," said Kang. “We placed it at the center of the space, between high walls on either side, to create a vertical sense of volume. Visitors passing through the structure naturally lift their eyes, and at the end of it they meet the flag.”

The larger change is organizational. The old gallery ran chronologically through Gojong’s proclamation and his modernization program. The new gallery is built around messages: the declaration of empire as a claim to sovereignty, then administrative reform, schools, newspapers and diplomacy, then the loss of sovereignty and the resistance to it. A slice of the Joseon gallery was annexed to make room, and the 19th-century section of Joseon Gallery 3 was rehung to match.

“A museum’s history exhibition carries more importance and influence than a history textbook,” said You Hong-june, director of the National Museum of Korea. “But our history galleries end with the Joseon dynasty, and the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History picks up from 1945. The history between Joseon and the Republic of Korea is blank.”

“Many people think the Joseon dynasty ended in 1910, [but] it did not,” You said. “Joseon closed in 1897, when the Korean Empire was proclaimed. And still we leave those 13 years as a gap, written off as the stretch in which incompetent ancestors handed the country to Japan.”

A gallery for the colonial period is planned, contingent on a second museum building whose floor-area problem has not been solved. You called the Korean Empire Gallery a preview of that.

“The existence of the Korean Empire has long sat at a distance from the public’s mind and from how we understand our own history,” You said. “Now that there is finally a gallery at the National Museum of Korea with the name ‘Korean Empire’ on the door, I hope it does something to set that straight.”

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