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The Chaebol Fortunes That Built South Korea’s Art World

Long before Frieze Seoul and the global K-pop boom, Samsung, Hyundai, LG and other family-controlled conglomerates built the museums, foundations and international partnerships that underpin the country's cultural ecosystem.

The “Korean Wave” is the result of a complex entanglement of private and public forces shaped by unprecedented alignment between strategic government policy and ambitious mega-corporations that began integrating art and culture into their sprawling business ecosystems long before cultural patronage and corporate art became a standard component of ESG frameworks. For decades, South Korea made targeted public investments in its creative industries, across K-music, television and cinema and, increasingly, contemporary art, most often running alongside the promotion of Korean fashion, food, beauty and other consumer industries. Subsequently, Korean culture has become a global phenomenon, with stars such as BTS filling stadiums in the United States and Latin America and museums across the world mounting an expanding number of exhibitions centered on Korean art.

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Revenues of the K-Content Industry reached KRW 165 trillion in 2025 (approximately $116.4 billion), up from KRW 151 trillion in 2024. As a result of this global popularity, tourism has also grown, with inbound visitors rising from 17.5 million in 2019 to a record of approximately 18.7 million in 2025. This year, tourism accelerated even further, with foreign arrivals surpassing 10 million by the third week of June and reaching 10.71 million in the first half of the year, up 21 percent year over year. While Seoul still leads the market, visitors are increasingly exploring regional hubs such as Busan and Jeju. Busan, for example, received nearly 1.94 million foreign visitors through May, with major K-pop events further accelerating the momentum as 110,000 people attended BTS’s two June concerts in the city. The K-pop craze remains a major driver of attraction, alongside a massive surge in medical tourism, particularly in dermatology and plastic surgery, and spending tied to the wider K-beauty economy.

South Korea’s postwar economic transformation was built around a developmental-state model in which government policy and a relatively small number of large business groups worked in tandem. The disposal of formerly Japanese-owned enterprises, relief funds, government-controlled foreign-currency allocations, preferential bank financing and U.S. economic assistance all contributed to the environment in which the chaebol developed. But it was also their ability to seek out opportunities arising from the tension and cooperation between state planning and private enterprise that allowed companies such as Samsung, Hyundai, LG and SK to build scale extraordinarily quickly. The ppalli-ppalli ethos served as a behavioral baseline that enabled these firms to build infrastructure rapidly, adapt to shifting international markets and commercialize products at speeds that often outpaced competitors. It is no coincidence that Korea’s development has also been described by the OECD as a “chaebol-led industrialization strategy.”

If public policy helped create the conditions for Korea’s global ascent—combining soft-power investments in cultural industries with duty-free shopping incentives and, most recently, more flexible entry policies, particularly targeting the Chinese market—the country’s corporations did much of the rest and continue to have an outsized impact in sustaining the country’s artistic and cultural infrastructure. These are the chaebol 재벌 (jaebeol), a term that in Korean combines “wealth” and “clan.”

Since the postwar period, the country has undergone extraordinarily rapid modernization and capitalization, following what is commonly described as the ppalli-ppalli (“quick-quick” or “hurry-hurry”) ethos, in which speed became integral to development. The symbiotic relationship between the chaebol and ppalli-ppalli culture served as one of the engines behind South Korea’s transformation from a war-torn nation into a global economic power—the so-called “Miracle on the Han River.”

What was unique about the chaebol model was that these groups typically consist of dozens of legally separate companies spanning unrelated sectors, while effective control has remained concentrated in a founding family, sometimes even when that family now owns only a relatively modest direct stake.

Samsung, for example, expanded far beyond electronics into insurance, construction, hotels, hospitals and other businesses. Hyundai moved across construction, automobiles, shipbuilding and finance. From the start, these Korean........

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