The fifty-eighth Venice Biennale opens its many doors to the public on 11th May. This year ninety countries will be represented in the national pavilions in the Giardini and elsewhere, including for the first time Ghana, Madagascar, Malaysia and Pakistan. In the same way that the Edinburgh Fringe overshadows the event around which it grew up, the pavilions usually attract more publicity than the multi-venue exhibition that sets the theme of each successive incarnation of the world’s most famous festival of contemporary art.

The exhibition Uri Korea: Serenity in Acceleration, which opened at the Museum of Ethnology, Hamburg, in December 2017, presents a selection of the museum’s rich collection of Korean art and ethnographic material. Although this is not the first exhibition on Korea to draw on the collection, this show benefits from new information that has come to light in a recent examination of the collection by the National Research Institute of Cultural Heritage, Daejeon, Korea, and in a separate comprehensive evaluation of the collection.1