Text Feature 2026-05-26

〈Arirang〉 Series, Four Prints (1991): What Does the British Museum Collection Mean?

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Summary

Four 〈Arirang〉 series woodblock prints by Shin Jang-sik, accessioned in a single batch by the British Museum in November 1991 (registrations 1991,1123,0.11–0.14). The four works — with motifs of candles in circles, arched windows, rounded rectangles, and a circular fan — register the visual diversity of the artist's interpretation of the concept across 1989–1991. The acquisition predates the founding of the British Museum's Korea Foundation Gallery (Room 67, opened 2000) by a full nine years, marking an early instance of the museum's active reception of contemporary Korean art. It also predates the UNESCO inscription of Arirang (2012) by twenty-one years and BTS's naming of their fifth studio album 〈Arirang〉 (2026) by thirty-five — placing the artist's 1989–1991 〈Arirang〉 series at the decisive early entry point of bringing the concept onto the international stage.

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The British Museum 1991

〈Arirang〉 (1991,1123,0.11)
The British Museum 1991

〈Arirang〉 (1991,1123,0.12)
The British Museum 1991

〈Arirang - morning III〉 (1991,1123,0.13)
The British Museum 1991

〈Arirang〉 (1991,1123,0.14)

Body

〈Arirang〉

2026-05-26

On 23 November 1991, the British Museum accessioned four 〈Arirang〉 series woodblock prints by Shin Jang-sik into its Korean collection in a single batch. The four works carry consecutive registration numbers from 1991,1123,0.11 to 0.14.

The four works carry distinct motifs: a grid of rounded rectangles (0.11), rows of candles within concentric circles (0.12), a circular fan rendered in red, yellow, blue, silver, and black (0.13), and a repetition of arched windows (0.14). Just as the 〈Arirang〉 folk song exists in approximately 3,600 variations of a single melody, the artist translated the same concept into a different visual language each time. Among the four, only 0.13 carries the artist's specified series title 〈Arirang — morning III〉 with Edition 10/11 — a visible marker of his own ordering within the series.

The British Museum's Korea Foundation Gallery (Room 67) was established nine years after this acquisition, opening in 2000 with the support of the Korea Foundation, and was refurbished in 2014 with a grant from the National Museum of Korea. The museum has stated that its Korean collection policy favours works with "a definite Korean quality" rather than international-style modern art — a deliberate selection for works in which Korean identity is clearly articulated. The 1991 acquisition predates the gallery's founding by a full nine years and stands as an early instance of the museum's active reception of contemporary Korean art.

For a painter, entering the British Museum's collection carries weight beyond the addition of works to an inventory. Founded in 1753, the British Museum is the world's first national museum, gathering the visual culture of humanity from circa AD 300 to the present in a single institution. To be held in its Korean collection — permanently preserved, accessible to scholars, researchers, and visitors — is generally read as a signal that the artist's visual language has been recognised as a chapter within the history of Korean art. The museum has noted that the rising prices of Korean art in recent years have made "major pieces increasingly difficult to acquire," which positions the 1991 acquisition of four works at once within a comparatively active acquisition period.

〈Arirang〉 is a Korean folk song inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — by South Korea in 2012 and by North Korea in 2014 — and has been transmitted through some 60 base versions and over 3,600 variations. It carries both the affect of han — sorrow and endurance shaped by the colonial and divided experiences of the twentieth century — and the affect of communal recovery and peaceful reconciliation. UNESCO has stated that the song "contributes to social relations, mutual respect, and peaceful social development, and helps people express their feelings and overcome grief." The artist's 1989–1991 〈Arirang〉 series gives the concept a contemporary visual form, and the diversity of motifs across the four works forms a visual analogue to the song's 3,600 variations.

In 1989, the artist held his first overseas solo exhibition with the 〈Arirang〉 series at Galerie Roho in Berlin, traveling the following year to ON GALLERY in Osaka. In the same period, he received the Grand Prize at the 8th for 〈Arirang — A Joyful Day Ⅴ〉, and second prizes at the Wakayama International Print Biennale in 1989, 1991, and 1993, drawing recognition from the Japanese art world. The British Museum's accession of these four works in November 1991 stands as a decisive entry point within this trajectory — placed nine years before the founding of the Korea Foundation Gallery (2000), twenty-one years before the UNESCO inscription of (2012), and thirty-five years before BTS named their fifth studio album 〈Arirang〉 (2026). The artist's 1989–1991 〈Arirang〉 series stands as a decisive early case of bringing the concept onto the international stage.

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Text Artist's Note 1996 · Shin Jang-sik

Artist Note by Shin Jang-sik — "Beyond the Sorrow-Soaked Arirang Pass: Toward a Lively Homecoming" (mid-to-late 1990s)

For a painter, the hometown is an important place that yields many cues for understanding the artist and the work. Many of the great modern masters created their formal vocabulary from the hometown of their own heart. My case will be no exception.
Where is my hometown? Where is the source from which I will create my own formal vocabulary?
When I think of my hometown, certain images come naturally to mind. The Suseongcheon stream that ran along the road, the trees of the land, the front mountain that could embrace my small body, the shrine at the bend of the road leading to that mountain, the small cave where a dragon was said to dwell, the rocky cleft that was the hideout of our play, the Suseong fields we made for when mountain play wearied us — chasing frogs and grasshoppers. In those days, those fields could not have been wider.
But these images changed as I grew up, and the hometown I imagined changed with them. From one summer day on, one could no longer bathe in the Suseongcheon. The figures of mothers washing laundry there disappeared. The face of the front mountain turned into roads and apartments. The shrine at the bend of the road to the mountain vanished. The small cave where a dragon was said to dwell no longer looked as though a dragon could possibly live there. The roads were paved with asphalt; the water was embanked.
Where is the hometown of my heart? When I was in middle school, I would take part in the Silla Cultural Festival held in Gyeongju. The art competition held in Gyerim during the festival was always an excuse to visit Gyeongju, and I would always join. The color of the dawn sky as I rode the early bus to Gyeongju, I cannot forget. Its progress toward a brightness beyond words, through the fading starlight, was a resonance of the soul. It was the rhythm of life that quickened the traveler heading toward a new world.
Something in Gyeongju always drew me — the broken-down face of our old culture and nature that I could still feel there. Perhaps my steps toward Gyeongju were so light because I could, without knowing, feel the shape of my heart's hometown there.
The time I grew up in was always under construction, always being built. The elementary school I attended was an overcrowded "bean-sprout" classroom, a construction site where new classrooms were being raised. In middle school, too, we studied amid the sound of explosions and bulldozers as a mountain was being cut down to make a playground. While I prepared for the college entrance exam, the corridor beside our classroom was being fitted with new windows, and the auditorium remained under construction for the full three years; barely the graduation ceremony was held there. At university, the road I had to bump and rattle along to attend was paved, and the buildings completed, only around graduation. Even now I sometimes see it — having ridden buses across iron plates over the gashed road, I had become an adult. From my childhood hometown to the time I became an adult, things were always under construction. Whether they will remain so, I do not know …
Where is the hometown of my heart?
Has it been buried beneath that construction site, beneath that asphalt? The time I grew up in was the time of rapid industrialization, of taking in Western culture. Mountains changed, factories were built, houses changed, and people grew more pressed. In the midst of all this, the face of our hometown changed — bulldozed away, buried under concrete and asphalt …
At this moment, as the downpour of Western culture is passing, the mind of mine that goes in search of the hometown of our culture feels like a new wind — like the rhythm of the dawn sky on the road to Gyeongju.
We must seek the hometown of our heart. Surely the root is still alive somewhere, under that asphalt-before-paving.
What did I study at university? I was busy learning the language and spirit that the downpour of Western culture had brought. To know it sooner than others was the only way to be reckoned with. The result was a chain of imitations, and the creation of our own new visual language was impossible.
Where has our formal vocabulary gone?
Now we must seek it. At this moment, as the downpour of Western culture is passing, we must bring our own language back to life. That is the way to revive the hometown of my heart, and to revive our culture. Not the indiscriminate imitation of Western culture, but expressing my own emotion and sensibility in our own forms — that is the way to create our hometown turned toward the twenty-first century.
The theme of my work is "Arirang." is a word that stands for the native sensibility of our people, our traditional way of seeing the world and things. The core of my Arirang work is to embody, on today's horizon, the intrinsic force and health that tradition carries. Tradition is what is vivid and exuberant, formed by the urgent demands of our life. What I have especially attended to and applied in my work is the various formal vocabularies formed in our substratum culture: the aesthetic expressions appearing in the implements used for shamanism, divination, prophecy, geomancy, and prognostication; the aesthetic forms and tastes appearing in the various instruments and flags used in the play of the common people who, even amid the toil of labor and the calamities of nature, sought to overcome them through play; the truthfulness and unaffectedness seen in (folk painting) …
Founded on shamanism — our people's indigenous folk faith — and grounded in the indigenized foreign religions (Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, the yin-yang and five-elements thought), I discovered a healthy force in the tradition of the substratum culture made by the necessities of life. I found the face of the hometown. But to recreate this within my own work, it had to be brought forth not as a fixed, immutable form bound to the past, but as something whose meaning-structure must be newly revealed from the standpoint and horizon of today. The core of that meaning-structure is, I believe, the vitality of harmony — the very face of the hometown. Yin and yang, water and fire, heaven and earth, even good and evil are not seen as opposing elements; rather, their collision integrates into one great vitality, expressed as a healthy force that harmonizes and reconciles.
Such a force can be symbolized in , the song that speaks for our sensibility.
"Arirang, Arirang, Arariyo I go over the Arirang pass."
Thus, in the that speaks for our sensibility, the hardship, han (the deep Korean sentiment of unresolved sorrow and resilience born of historical hardship), and sorrow of crossing the passes of history are contained. But from our present standpoint, I think we must emphasize not such sorrow but rather the will and hope of crossing the pass. Rather than thinking of a fallen hometown, we must seek a hometown with force and spirit (shinbaram).

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Text Review 1992 · Artist's Blog

Shin Jang-sik Print Exhibition 〈Arirang〉 Essay — Anonymous (1992)

What Shin has pursued is the expression of rhythm. To express rhythm is to breathe life into a painting, and when the surface is fully saturated with rhythm, the resonance a viewer feels before it grows richer. "Everything that lives carries rhythm," he holds, "and my task is to find the point where my own breath aligns with the rhythm of the materials." "At first my conscious intentions were strong, but gradually I came to perceive the rhythm of the materials themselves, and by working upon that recognition, new ideas emerged and the works gained vitality. … How dry and lifeless are works into which no life has been breathed?" Such is roughly how he began to describe his own artistic world. Concepts like vitality, rhythm, and movement form the foundation of his work. By setting aside calculated intention and following the rhythm of himself and his materials, the vitality inherent in nature and his own sensibility emerge of their own accord.

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Text Artist's Note 1989-08-23 · Shin Jang-sik

Artist Note — Shin Jang-sik "Arirang" Print Exhibition (1989)

This work depicts the joyful day through the image of swaying (blue-and-red silk lanterns), rendered in woodblock print. The direct subject comes from the closing ceremony of the 1988 Seoul Olympics: the final program, "Annyeong (Farewell)," where every performer and spectator waved these lanterns to celebrate the success of the Games and to bid farewell to those returning to their homelands. I redesigned the lanterns in a contemporary form, based on those preserved at the Dankook University Costume Museum. The multicolor woodblock prints were produced using somyeolbeop (the reduction method), newly adapted here to woodblock printing.
is the folk song that most fully represents the emotional landscape of the Korean people. Rather than emphasizing han—the sentiment of sorrow—my intention is to express the spirit of hope and will that carries one over the Arirang pass.

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Text Review 1989-08-23 · Choi Tae-man

Arirang: Self-Affirmation and Generosity (1989)

The consistent theme that governs Shin Jang-sik's work is the optimistic and realistic will to life rooted deep in the consciousness and emotional fabric of the Korean people. This theme manifests in his work under the title 〈Arirang〉. is the most representative of all Korean oral folk songs. It is commonly understood as expressing han—the sentiment of sorrow. Yet it is not merely a passive refrain or onomatopoeia that reflects han as a resigned, withdrawn emotion.
carries the longing of the people to cross over from the suffering and oppression of present reality into a better future. Take the lyric "I go over the Arirang pass": the speaker is not the lover who abandons and departs but the very subject who crosses the pass. Here, the pass symbolizes a reality saturated with contradiction and hardship. In the end, Arirang expresses the will to overcome such a reality rather than to evade or resign before it. It is neither a distorted lament of grief and tragedy, nor a complacent, optimistic hum. Within it are the emotions that perpetually arise in real life—joy and sorrow, despair and hope, defeat and resurgence, negation and affirmation, anger and forgiveness, the tragic and the optimistic—expressed in composite and total form. Arirang, therefore, can be called a symbol of future-oriented consciousness reflecting the dialectical posture and way of life by which our ancestors accepted and sought to transcend the contradictions of reality through the social practice of labor.
What Shin Jang-sik attends to in is precisely this positive worldview that lies hidden within it.
He has labored to discover the genuine values embedded in and to express them in his own distinctive language. He has already revealed one fruit of these efforts in last year's painting exhibition at To Gallery and his print exhibition at the 3rd Gallery. To give visible form to the composite meanings Arirang carries, he has studied folk paintings (), shamanic paintings (), and traditional patterns and visual symbols. Such traditional objects—the (blue-and-red silk lanterns), the obangwisaek () and saekdong (rainbow stripes), flags, the , and religious imagery such as the bicheonsang (heavenly maidens) and lotus motifs—were used in everyday life and combine aesthetic, practical, and symbolic qualities. He reinterprets the meanings inherent in these objects in fresh ways.
As one sees in the series 〈Arirang — Wish I〉, the traditional objects he introduces into his works function as symbols revealing his affirmative vision. The series is composed of countless simplified candle flames. As the title "Wish" already suggests, the candle is a symbol of purification (jeonghwa) and longing. Though it bears religious meaning, it also carries the practical meaning of an implement that illumines darkness. In its composition, recalling the main hall of a Buddhist temple where countless Buddha statues are enshrined, this work shows numerous candles radiating their small lights toward a great circle centered above, metaphorically revealing one of his core themes: sangsaeng (mutual generation) and unification. It is at once a gathering of humble wishes and the splendor of a brilliance born of small lights converging. This summation of flames is the union of a healthy consciousness rising to shake off suffering and contradiction (darkness).
The content carried in Shin's work rests on such healthiness. Through cheerful, bright colors and simple, lucid forms, he reveals the content he wishes to express clearly and directly. In particular, he chose the woodblock as the medium that could most successfully bear such content and form within the print medium. The woodblock not only suits his temperament in material and technique but also, as he came to know through experience while producing many kinds of prints, proves apt for absorbing the content he had in mind. He has independently developed a technique called somyeolbeop (the reduction method), thereby surpassing the expressive limits of the woodblock and opening up its richer flavor and possibilities. Through the repetition of cutting and printing, the form that gradually emerges fully reflects the charm of the handmade print. The image acquires a distinctive beauty in which the artist's plan and will combine with accidental effects and even the characteristics of the material itself (the wood grain).
Shin Jang-sik knows well that the woodblock is the medium most fittingly able to receive the content and meaning he pursues. Furthermore, he actively draws on the fact that wood, as a material, is not exclusive but receptive—he believes that the woodblock can naturally absorb the subjects of his work.
This strength of his work derives, at its root, from his optimistic worldview. It rests on the conviction that accompanies the spiritual generosity of magnanimity and self-affirmation. He is therefore wary of any vision that grasps art as something supremely transcendent. Such a vision risks veiling art behind an esoteric mystique or subordinating it to abstruse ideas and theories. This is precisely why he loves, especially among traditional objects, those that satisfied both aesthetic consciousness and utility, those widely used among the common people.
The appeal of his work lies in its positive and active vision of the world and the self—that is, in its securing of the healthiness of consciousness.

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Mixed Review 1989-07-01 · Kim Young-jae

Art Post, "Metalinguistic Possibilities of Arirang" — Kim Young-jae Critique (1989)

The artist Shin Jang-sik introduces motifs that carry traditional iconographic meaning, drawing on an aesthetic consciousness grounded in the people's sensibility to generate colors and translate them into pictorial form. This vein of work expands across his planar, object-based, and three-dimensional pieces — and here we trace his process of binding the lineage of tradition to the contemporary modernization of folk sensibility, and seek out its significance. ⟨Editor⟩
Shin Jang-sik's exhibition arrives as a genuinely timely show, prompting reflection on the position Korean art should hold after the Olympics — and on the kind of pictorial idiom that, as a regional language within the world, might forge international resonance.
The Seoul Olympics — like geological shifts or canyon-edge dwellings that those living within them cannot perceive but observers at a distance can read as immense transformations — have sent powerful ripples our way. Recall the many foreign exhibitions held in Korea after the Olympics: from the Soviet Contemporary Art exhibition to the Hungarian Contemporary Art show, the Eastern European exhibitions including those from Yugoslavia, the encounters with the work of Ardian Konti, and the German Impressionist prints exhibition; together with the Bauhaus retrospective and a German contemporary painting show overwhelming in its sheer scale — even a German contemporary painting exhibition a few years back, expected to be difficult to arrange, is worth noting. Whatever the circumstances — whether foreign artists deemed our $10-billion-surplus emerging industrial nation worth investing in, or were moved by the civic spirit Koreans showed during the Olympics, or whether nations now feel we are 'worth adding a line' to their résumé — like the gates of Joseon opening to the great powers in our era of enlightenment, large-scale exhibitions and heavyweight artists are pouring in.
In the midst of this upheaval in the art-world map, Shin's exhibition reveals the 'possibility' of embodying what is ours while simultaneously globalizing what is ours. To make clear why I stress the word 'possibility,' let us examine the idiom Shin employs. Shin's paintings are composed of ordinary words — vocabulary we use unconsciously in everyday life — assembled into images that might be called narrative or symbolic.
First, let us look at our everyday language. It divides into the language of designation, the language of meaning, and the language of concept. For example, when we say 'this is a chair,' the word 'chair' is a designative language that points to a name. But when we say 'a chair is a chair,' it becomes a language of meaning that points to functions that may not even include a chair as such. Going further, if we speak of 'the chair used at the execution ground,' the situation imparts concepts such as glory or death.
Following this rough division as it applies to Shin's paintings: 〈Tal-Ⅱ〉 (Plate 1) corresponds to the language of designation. Despite his efforts toward material and expressive direction, what comes to mind first are heavy, named identities — a club-bearing mask, a mask of escape from grace and grudge, a recognizable name. 〈Ⅰ — Banishing Spirits Ⅲ〉 (Plate 2) can be seen as corresponding to the language of meaning. Just as the emphasis falls on 'something to sit on' rather than 'a chair,' the concrete designative language of 'spirits' and 'banishing' is replaced by the apotropaic vocabulary of phoenixes and feather standards (辟邪). 〈Arirang — Joyful Day〉 (Plate 3), by contrast, can be likened to the language of concept. No concrete designative language is visible. The composition, with its warm colors as keynote, may be read as the form of janggu drums and folding fans, or as the three-color and figures of brushes, where form is divested of name and emerges as a figurative word that concretizes the abstract noun '.'
Read in this order — 〈Tal-Ⅱ〉, 〈Ⅰ — Banishing Spirits〉, 〈Arirang — Joyful Day〉 — Shin's painting deepens, and one might feel that 〈Arirang — Joyful Day〉 embodies the highest language he has shown, or even the method for expressing the essence of Korean art. Yet these languages remain everyday language put to use as the language of art.
What then is the language of art? I would venture to call it a Meta-Language — language gathered from words we use without much resistance. Not, of course, in the linguistic sense of language used to analyze language, but in the sense of a Hyperlanguage (超言語) that transcends everyday language. On that premise, I note that this meta-language expresses the title of a poem or the state of a piece of music. Let us look at how meta-language can be formed in Shin's 〈Arirang — Morning〉 (Plate 4).
If we attached a commentary like, 'the auspicious sun where the sacred bird dwells casts solemn radiance over the twelve thousand peaks of , driving away darkness in the clear morning,' would it not become an overly narrative prose form? It is true, of course, that designative vocabulary of this sort is visible in the painting. Let us regard this prose as the world of an algebraic function and differentiate it to extract its meaning. To say, 'the auspicious morning sun that breaks the darkness of the homeland,' is plainly to let designative language slip in. Sun = bird, darkness = a black plane, the form of the twelve thousand peaks — these are linked by at least relations of inequality, or must pass through a process of distillation. Let us differentiate this language of meaning once more. Condensed to 'auspicious morning of the homeland,' what we find — like the legs that snakes do not have — is the cumbersome bundles of light invisibly cleaving the darkness. Even when a certain proposition emerges in the conceptual language of 'morning of ,' to bring out the title-like compression of 〈Arirang — Morning〉 the work must, through several rounds of thought and differentiation, shed its excess; only then can it appear as an image that might match the lively notes of a song, shoulders dancing. In fact, what Shin imagines as Arirang differs from this dreamy inference: what he knows as Arirang is, by his own experience, a certain desolation or anguish — the wails of wandering spirits in the underworld pressing on the present heart so it cannot move — though this experience is hardly something one can impose on everyone.
Returning to the theme: it is clear that Shin's paintings emphasize narrative everyday language more than the meta-language we call the language of art. Why then Shin's paintings? What is it that draws the gaze to Shin's paintings?
⟪That Shin can introduce everyday vocabulary and yet make us feel a sticky Korean scent is an orientation toward the Korean smell of sweat. That he chooses woodblock printmaking by the reductive method is, for the Korean body, in a way a natural and inevitable outcome.⟫
I find in Shin's paintings a certain frisson. It seems akin to the elation that comes upon discovering something fresh. The feeling of finding, in an unexpected place, something more eye-catching than expected — as one living today in this country, as a Korean — is, in my view, the most practical and concrete means of approaching the world; and to my eyes Shin's paintings have stood out as something fresh. If the basic strategy by which Korean artists might leap onto the world stage is to make the people of the world pause, draw close, want to touch, want to buy, and want to remember or own, then Shin's pictorial world is fully capable of forming inner resonance. And that resonance is not only the Korean feeling that 'this must be what Korea is like'; even those who do not understand Korean sensibility, if they understand the idiom of a citizen of the world, may well feel that fresh frisson in Shin's paintings and the urge to draw close and touch.
Once more: that Shin can introduce everyday vocabulary and yet make us feel a sticky Korean scent is an orientation toward the Korean smell of sweat. That he chooses woodblock printmaking by the reductive method is, for the Korean body, in a way a natural and inevitable outcome.
In producing multi-color prints by the reductive method, instead of using several plates one gradually carves down a single plate, pulling a set number of impressions — a technique well suited, I believe, to a Korean disposition that is itself native to printmaking. The reason the Tripitaka Koreana was carved on wood rather than set in metal type, when one thinks about it, is that for Koreans, lowering the body and devoting long, sincere effort yields something of faith; the result is a transparent consciousness and pure spirit, and naturally connects to a one-time completeness. Wood was therefore chosen, and to relish the sense of fulfillment that comes from the sustained, Korean embodiment of spirit, what we might call the 'reductive' — a one-time carving — is performed.
Building on the experience and reflections of Shin's exhibition at Toh Gallery, the woodblock prints by the reductive method are now shown at The 3rd Gallery. Let us watch how much of everyday language Shin can stockpile for the sake of meta-language, and how effectively he can articulate a Korean world-language.

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