The National Museum of Asian Art planned to open “Korean Treasures: Collected, Cherished, Shared” on November 8—right as the longest federal government shutdown in US history brought the Smithsonian to a standstill. Visitor services halted, publicity froze, and the museum lurched into crisis management. Yet behind locked doors, curators and art handlers—who were still allowed to work—continued quietly installing celadons, Buddhist paintings, palace screens, and modernist canvases. That the opening was delayed by only a few days feels emblematic: “Korean Treasures” is ultimately about what persists—through war, colonization, ideological division, and now even the precarities of contemporary US federal infrastructure.

It is also a show about how a cultural canon is made, and by whom. This marks the first US presentation of masterpieces from the Lee Collection, the 23,000-work bequest assembled across seven decades by Samsung founder Lee Byung-chul, his son Lee Kun-hee, and their family. Donated to the Republic of Korea in 2021, the bequest reshaped Korea’s public museums overnight. Seen in Washington, D.C.—where Korean art remains sparsely represented—the collection reads simultaneously as an intimate family archive and as an infrastructural blueprint: evidence of how private capital, heritage politics, and global asymmetries of visibility have historically shaped the contours of K...