Leeum Museum of Art: Free Permanent Collection, Booked in Advance

The site is small and steep and holds three separate structures, each by a different practice, completed in 2004.

Museum 1 — the antiquities building, by Mario Botta — is a cone of terracotta-coloured brick wrapped around a spiral stair, and you descend through it from the top: celadon, buncheong ware, metalwork, Buddhist painting and calligraphy, arranged so that each floor is one material.

Museum 2, by Jean Nouvel, holds modern and contemporary art in a boxier structure of corroded steel and glass, showing Korean artists alongside international names.

The third building, by Rem Koolhaas's office, houses the children's education centre and the temporary exhibition space, in black concrete that reads as deliberately unfinished beside the other two.

The collection is the reason to come, but the buildings are half the visit — three internationally significant architects working on adjoining plots at the same time is not something you see often.

The permanent collection is free, and that is genuinely free rather than a promotion — but it is issued as a timed reservation through the museum's own site.

Book a few days ahead for a weekend slot and the day before for a weekday. Popular special exhibitions sell their paid tickets well in advance, and the museum periodically suspends online booking for maintenance — a suspension is posted for 6 to 8 September 2026 on its notice board, which is exactly the sort of thing that catches a visitor arriving without a slot.

Check the notices before travelling across the city in any case: the museum posted a temporary closure and shortened operating hours for 1 to 3 September 2026. Yongsan is twenty-five minutes from the palace quarter and it is a long way to go for a locked door.

In the antiquities building, the celadon floor is the one to slow down for. Goryeo inlaid celadon is the material Korea is best known for internationally, and Leeum's holdings are among the finest anywhere — the difference between seeing three pieces in a national museum case and seeing a floor of them is substantial.

The Buddhist painting and the gold metalwork are the other two strengths. Several pieces are designated National Treasures, and the labelling explains why in English.

In the contemporary building the collection rotates, but the constant is the pairing of Korean artists with international ones on equal terms — which was the point of the museum when it opened.

If you have already been to the National Museum of Korea, the comparison is instructive: the national collection tells the history of a country, and Leeum shows what a very rich private foundation bought when it went looking for the best examples of it.