While primarily envisaged as a home for temporary displays of visuals arts, the KCC exhibition space over the years has hosted a number of exhibitions featuring historical or literary themes. 2024 started, for example, with an exhibition looking at the early relations between the UK and Korea, celebrating 140 years of diplomatic relations, and later celebrated the 26 Korean words that had recently been included in the Oxford English Dictionary for the first time.
At an informative talk at SOAS at the end of February this year the KCC’s Director Seunghye Sun and Curator Jaemin Cha pointed out that for the Joseon literati the lines between art and literature were not clear-cut: poetry, calligraphy and landscape painting could merge into one on a single artwork. Director Sun expressed a life-long passion for literature, and said she had long harboured a desire to highlight some of the gems of the Korean literary tradition in the London exhibition space, inspired in part by a recent exhibition of twentieth-century bestsellers presented by the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History. As can often be the case with humanities projects, funding seemed to be one of the main obstacles to be overcome. But with the news that Han Kang had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – an announcement made on 10 October 2025, a day after Hangul Day – an exhibition project that would place Han’s achievement in the context of Korea’s longer literary tradition was given the green light. And the KCC was fortunate that its curator, Jaemin Cha, studied literature at university. Thus the KCC’s current exhibition – Bestselling and Beloved: Korean Literary Treasures – came into being.
The exhibition is divided into five sections. The first is entitled “Timeless masterpieces“, selecting a few well-known pre-modern titles that have benefited from modern adaptation in film, or even honoured by a translation in the Penguin Classics series: titles such as Hong Gildong (anon – attr Heo Kyun) and The Nine Cloud Dream (Kim Man-jung) and novels adapted from the pansori canon such as Chunhyang (anon). Also honoured by inclusion in this section are three twentieth century poets: Yi Sang, Yun Dong-ju and Pak Mog-wol of which the first two are perhaps best known in English, though all three have had work translated.
The second section focuses on the first modern bestseller: Jeong Bi-seok’s Madame Freedom, first serialised in the Seoul Shinmun in 1954 and adapted as a well-known movie by first by Han Hyung-mo (1956) and then in five later remakes. When reprinted in book form after the serialisation finished it sold 100,000 copies which, though not a big number by more recent standards, was a record for the time.
Moving on from the 50s, the next section (A Mirror of the Times) aims to identify decade-by-decade literary trends and picks key titles from the remaining decades of the twentieth century, focusing on some of the bestsellers. For me, this is the most valuable section of the exhibition. A helpful list of the top twenty bestsellers of the twentieth century is provided as a handout, which reads as follows:
| Rank | Title | Author | Copies sold (millions) |
| 1 | Samgukji (Romance of the Three Kingdoms) (삼국지 – 10 Vols) |
Yi Mun-yol (이문열) |
11.3 |
| 2 | Yeongungmun (The Novel of Heroes) (소설 영웅문 -– translated from Chinese) |
Jin Yong (김용 sic) |
8.0 |
| 3 | Toemarok (퇴마록 – 15 vols) |
Lee Woo-hyeok (이우혁) |
5.1 |
| 4 | The Art of War (소설 손자병법) |
Jeong Bi-seok (정비석) |
5.0 |
| 5 | The Taekbaek Mountains (태백산맥 – 10 vols) |
Jo Jung-rae (조정래) |
4.5 |
| 6 | Jang Gil-san (장길산 – 10 vols) |
Hwang Sok-yong (황석영) |
4.3 |
| 7 | The Rose of Sharon Bloomed (무궁화 꽃이 피었습니다 – 3 vols) |
Kim Jin-myung (김진명) |
4.0 |
| 8 | Donguibogam (소설 동의보감 – 3 vols) |
Lee Eun-seong (이은성) |
3.9 |
| 9 | Land (토지 – 16 Vols) |
Pak Kyung-ni (박경리) |
3.55 |
| 10 | Human Market (인간시장 – 20 Vols) |
Kim Hong-shin (김홍신) |
3.5 |
| 11 | Holloseogi (poetry) (홀로서기 – 5 vols) |
Seo Jung-yoon (서정윤) |
3.0 |
| 12 | Bangapda, Nonriya (Nice to meet you, Logic) (반갑다, 논리야 – 3 vols) |
Wi Kichul (위기철) |
2.85 |
| 13 | The Secrets of Tojeong (소설 토정비결- 3 vols) |
Lee jae-woon (이재운) |
2.75 |
| 14 | Arirang (아리랑 – 12 vols) |
Jo Jung-rae (조정래) |
2.75 |
| 15 | The Art of Worldly Wisdom (세상을 보는 지혜 – 3 vols) |
Baltasar Gracian y Morales | 2.5 |
| 16 | Chicken Soup for the Soul (마음을 열어주는 101가지 이야기 – 3 vols) |
Jack Canfield et al | 2.45 |
| 17 | Admonitions on Governing the People (historical novel) (소설 목민심서 – 5 vols) |
Hwang Inkyung (황인경) |
2.4 |
| 18 | My Cultural Heritage Exploration (나의 문화유산답사기 – 3 vols) |
Yu Hongjun (유홍준) |
2.35 |
| 19 | Ireobeorin Neo (Lost You) (잃어버린 너 – 3 vols) |
Kim Yoon-hee (김윤희) |
2.2 |
| 20 | Thousand Years of Love (천년의 사랑 – 2 vols) |
Yang Gui-ja (양귀자) |
2.1 |
We should not be surprised that some of these titles are non-fiction, remembering how well titles such as A Brief History of Time sold in the UK; it is perhaps more of interest that the list includes two items of foreign non-fiction in translation: Chicken Soup for the Soul is an American contemporary self-help title that my AI assistant describes as “literary comfort food—stories about kindness, resilience, love, and everyday miracles, often shared by ordinary people reflecting on extraordinary moment”, while The Art of Worldly Wisdom is a classic collection of 17th-century aphorisms by a Spanish Jesuit thinker. The two Korean-language non-fiction works are an introduction to logic and the initial part of a classic work of domestic cultural tourism whose publication started in the 1990s and which has expanded over the years to 12 volumes. Personally, I’d love to see that translated into English but I think it’s one I’ll have to browse in the original.
Of the bestselling fiction titles written in Korean, as yet none have been translated in full into English. Part of the challenge with these bestsellers is that they are so long – often being serialised in newspapers or magazines over the course of several years, the resulting sagas ending up as multi-volume sets: a somewhat intimidating prospect for the Anglophone audience which has traditionally been resistant to translated fiction. Back in 2012 work started on translating Jo Jung-rae’s Taebaek Mountains, but it never reached the light of day. The nearest thing we have to an English translation of one of these bestsellers is the three-volume English edition of Part 1 of Pak Kyung-ni’s Land. Pak’s magnum opus extends to five parts, though Part 1 can be read separately as a standalone work. Those wanting to explore why a translated Chinese martial arts epic should appear at number 2 in the bestsellers list can readily find English translations of Jin Yong’s novels in the bookstores.
In a welcome detour, the curator strayed outside of the bestseller list for this section of the exhibition, including some titles which she considered culturally important and which illustrated some of the broader literary trends identified in the period (see slideshow further down this post for those trends). I was pleased to see Yi Chong-jun’s Seopyeonje / People from Namdo series (1976-1981) on display as it’s one of my all-time favourites as well as being a significant milestone in the career of film director Im Kwon-taek (whose adaptation is one of the most important movies of the early 1990s). Another novel that captured the mood of the times and received a popular screen adaptation was Cho Sun-jak’s 1974 novel Young-ja’s Heydays (film directed by Kim Ho-sun, 1975).
The titles selected also included some works which the authorities wanted to suppress, such as Kim Chi-ha’s Five Bandits / Five Thieves and Pak Nohae’s Dawn of Labour. Interestingly, both of these titles have made it into English translation, though Pak Nohae had to wait until 2024 for Brother Anthony’s translation to find a publisher.1 It is good to find these once “dangerous” books now being accepted into the official literary canon, just as Korea’s National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art now finds it possible to include the works of minjung artists in its exhibitions of highlights from its collection.
The final sections of the exhibition look briefly at the current state of Korean literature in translation – which include, of course, Han Kang – and have some video interviews with the Nobel Laureate. The display highlights some of the recent publication trends, including genre fiction, and gives us a tantalising glimpse of some upcoming titles due to be published later in 2025.
The exhibition Bestselling and Beloved: Korean Literary Treasures has been extended until 21 March 2025.
- A translation of Kim Chi-ha’s Five Bandits can be found in the anthology Colors of Dawn. [↩]