The Korean Cultural Centre UK in London presents 《The Unclassified》 from 25 September to 31 December 2026. Bringing together four Korean and Korean-heritage artists—Meekyoung Shin, Ayoung Kim, siren eun young jung, and Gala Porras-Kim—the exhibition examines how museums and galleries preserve, document, and classify culture. At its centre are the processes through which artworks and artefacts shape cultural knowledge, alongside the experiences and memories that these systems cannot fully capture.
 
Objects entering a museum are labelled and classified according to their date and place of production, materials, and function. This information provides a basis for understanding them, yet it rarely encompasses the environments in which they were used or the human relationships surrounding them. The exhibition takes this gap as its starting point. Through the work of four artists, it explores the relationships between preservation and change, official records and alternative narratives, and material evidence and embodied memory.

Meekyoung Shin — Sculpture Transformed Through Use and Touch
 
Meekyoung Shin’s new project, Korean Classic: In Use (2026), sends soap sculptures into everyday settings across the UK before returning them to the exhibition bearing traces of use. Developed in collaboration with LUSH, the project places the sculptures in cafés, universities, cultural institutions, and shops, where they change shape through human touch and contact with water. It extends the artist’s ongoing Toilet Project.
 
The sculptures draw on plaster casts of classical Greek and Roman heads familiar from art education in Korea. As classical forms taught as enduring standards are translated into soap that gradually wears away, the works bear traces of contact across different times and places.
 
This process invites a reconsideration of preservation. From the standpoint of maintaining an original form, erosion constitutes damage. In Shin’s work, however, it can be read as a record of encounters with people. The sculptures returning to the exhibition carry both their initial forms and the traces of everyday life that have transformed them.

siren eun young jung — An Archive Carried Through Bodies and Voices
 
Through her 《Yeoseong Gukgeuk Project》, ongoing since 2008, siren eun young jung explores the history and transmission of yeoseong gukgeuk, a form of Korean musical theatre in which women perform all roles, including male characters. The genre flourished in Korea during the 1950s. Working with video, performance, interviews, and archival materials, the artist traces knowledge held in performers’ memories and bodies.
 
Photographs and scripts alone cannot fully account for the history of performance. Ways of using the voice, habitual movements, and the processes of learning and passing on roles contain experiences that are difficult to reduce to written documents. Jung’s work invites viewers to recognise these experiences as forms of cultural knowledge.
 
From this perspective, an archive can be understood both as a repository of historical materials and as a process through which memory passes between bodies and generations. The history of gender expression and relationships within yeoseong gukgeuk can likewise be read anew through this transmission.

Ayoung Kim — Historical Records and Fiction in Dialogue
 
Ayoung Kim presents the two-channel video PH Express. Taking Britain’s occupation of Geomundo in the late nineteenth century as its subject, the work explores episodes of imperial history surrounding the islands, then known as Port Hamilton. It interweaves materials grounded in historical research with fictional narratives.
 
The exhibition places the work within a broader inquiry into how history is recorded and who holds the authority to record it. Attention falls on both the content of historical records and the positions from which they were produced. Who occupies the centre or the margins—and how an event’s causes and significance are understood—depends on who tells the story.
 
In Kim’s work, fiction can be read as a device for reconsidering historical facts. By exposing the narrative methods used to connect disparate sources, the work invites viewers to consider the distance between an established historical account and the perspective that shaped it.

Gala Porras-Kim — The Scope of Preservation and Interpretation
 
Gala Porras-Kim presents Burial chamber scene (2025) and All Earth energy sources are known to come from the Sun (2025). The former imagines a view from within a burial chamber, while the latter uses brass plates to reflect natural light onto the gallery walls, allowing traces to emerge as environmental conditions change.
 
Read together, the two works reveal a gap between making objects visible and understanding their meanings. Analysing an artefact’s form and materials cannot fully reconstruct the beliefs and experiences to which it once belonged. Traces produced by light over time also draw attention to the ongoing effects of environmental conditions within the gallery.
 
These works ask how far preservation and interpretation can reach. Understanding an object involves considering both an institution’s capacity to care for and explain it and the uncertainties that remain.
 
 
 
Questioning How Culture Is Interpreted
 
A key concern of the exhibition is how the specific experiences explored by Korean and Korean-heritage artists connect with questions of cultural preservation and interpretation. Classical forms encountered in art education, the transmission of yeoseong gukgeuk, the history surrounding Geomundo, and the relationship between artefacts and natural environments offer distinct starting points for examining the conditions under which cultural knowledge is produced.
 
Seen in this light, 《The Unclassified》 invites reflection on the international role of Korean contemporary art. Drawing on their own histories and experiences, the artists help shape what is recognised as culture and how it is passed on to future generations. The depth of the exhibition’s inquiry lies here: in examining the methods used to preserve objects together with the ways we understand the lives and memories bound up with them.

The Korean Cultural Centre UK (KCCUK) opened in London in 2008 as a cultural institution affiliated with the Embassy of the Republic of Korea in the United Kingdom. Located near Trafalgar Square, it introduces Korean arts and culture and promotes cultural exchange between Korea and the UK through exhibitions, performances, film screenings, and educational programmes.
 
 
 
Exhibition Information
 
Exhibition: 《The Unclassified》
Dates: 25 September–31 December 2026
Venue: Korean Cultural Centre UK, London
Participating Artists: Meekyoung Shin, Ayoung Kim, siren eun young jung, Gala Porras-Kim
Admission: Free
Website: Korean Cultural Centre UK