Sunny Art Daily

Earlier this year, I had my first real exposure to Southeast Asia—a region that had been entirely unfamiliar to me. This came both through brief visits to several developing countries and through engaging with many people from these regions while in Seoul. Across both education and the arts, these encounters reminded me—once again, despite having grown up immersed in it—just how distinctive Korea’s passion for learning truly is.

What surprises most foreigners is how Korean families place education at the very top of their priorities. Parents are willing to make extreme sacrifices for their children’s future—often well beyond financial comfort. In 2024 alone, Korean households spent ₩29.3 trillion (over US$20 billion) on private education, and the nation devoted 7.06% of its GDP to education in 2022—one of the highest rates in the world.

While such intensity is sometimes criticized as excessive, it reflects the deep-rooted pressure to survive and thrive in a hyper-competitive society. Families move across the country for better school districts, send young children abroad to boarding schools, and pay international school tuition averaging ₩41 million (US$30K) per year—plus private tutoring on top. These choices remain nearly unimaginable in most other nations.

But this passion for learning doesn’t stop with child-rearing—it permeates Korean society at large. In the arts especially, the desire to learn has become a powerful cultural driver. Even those who don’t collect artworks actively seek to understand them: they attend lectures, buy catalogues, join seminars, and “study” art with the same fervor seen in classrooms. This hunger for knowledge builds communities, sustains markets, and nurtures a unique kind of cultural literacy. Curiosity and the willingness to approach art intellectually seem almost second nature to Koreans.

Of course, the Korean art scene has its critics, especially regarding the uniformity of taste: similar paintings, similar galleries, and similar works hung in similar apartments. Yet viewed from abroad—especially from regions where intellectual curiosity is not a social norm—this level of consistency and scale is often met with admiration. At the heart of it lies a collective desire to learn, a fear of falling behind, and an insatiable drive to discover the new.

The art market makes this visible. Even after major chaebol families pulled back from large-scale collecting, the Korean art world has continued to thrive—powered by the depth and resilience of domestic collectors and art lovers.

The rise of private museums is particularly striking. On a per capita basis, South Korea has over 5.7 times as many privately funded art museums as the United States. Large institutions are packed with aspiring docents in training, while office workers gather after hours to tour exhibitions together—behavior that can seem obsessive to outsiders. At the same time, YouTubers and Instagram personalities fill galleries and museums, documenting every moment and amplifying public interest.

Korea’s gallery ecosystem has also grown increasingly multilayered. New galleries continue to open, even during economic downturns, standing alongside established “pillar galleries.” Their financial models may be opaque, but their efforts to assert distinct curatorial voices are unmistakable. This interplay—between commercial drive and cultural curiosity—is what gives Korea’s art scene its distinctive flavor and global appeal.

Naturally, such fervor has its side effects. Competition can overheat; personal taste is sometimes eclipsed by trend-chasing. The very concept of “collector” is increasingly entangled with social media and marketing. Art is often staged as spectacle and branding.

The launch of Frieze Seoul, as many critics have noted in relation to other global art fairs, still feels like a stage of heightened public enthusiasm—more performative than contemplative. In Seoul, where collecting culture is still relatively young, this shift feels especially stark.

And perhaps, I’ve benefited from this global moment more than I care to admit.

Still, for developing countries still shaping their cultural identities, Korea’s participatory art culture can appear almost utopian.

In the end, Korea has cultivated something rare: a collective energy powered by a deep desire to learn. From education to the arts, this drive has become one of the country’s greatest cultural strengths.

South Korea may still be an emerging player in the global art market, and its overall financial scale may not yet rival that of the West or China. But its unique combination of educational intensity and cultural ambition continues to shape a society where learning itself is both a survival strategy and a creative force.