Lengthy earlier than Korean movie, tv and music achieved international prominence, the curator and scholar Beth McKillop, who has died of metastatic breast most cancers aged 72, was arguing that Korean creative traditions deserved consideration in their very own proper, slightly than as a footnote to the histories of China or Japan.
By way of her work on the Victoria & Albert Museum and on the British Library, McKillop helped rework how Korean artwork was understood, introducing guests, college students and researchers to the nation’s ceramics, books and design, and serving to set up a discipline that’s now central to the research of east Asian artwork in Britain.
Her biggest achievement got here between 1990 and 1993, when she was seconded from the British Library to the V&A as Samsung curator of Korean artwork, and established the UK’s first everlasting museum gallery devoted to the topic. Drawing on relationships she developed throughout South Korea, McKillop expanded the V&A’s Korean holdings by greater than 120 objects, each historic and modern.
These included a placing celadon vase (1990) by the ceramic artist Shin Sang-ho, which exemplifies the dialogue between custom and innovation that McKillop sought to focus on. As she famous in her catalogue, “the vase pays homage to the Koryŏ custom [AD918-1392] with its spreading rim, small loops on the shoulders, and delicately inlaid pair of white and black cranes in flight”, but diverges with its angular physique.
“The trunk of a pine tree appears to develop out of one of many edge strains that divide the bottle into irregular sides, and its leaves path into the strains of the glaze crackle.”
In addition to ceramics, the gallery launched guests to Korean textiles, furnishings and ornamental arts. A late-Nineteenth-century vibrant folding display screen depicts the 4 seasons with birds and flowers. A wonsam bridal gown made by the style designer Lee Younger-hee, exhibits how traditions proceed to evolve. A 1991 tanch’ŏng portray (used to embellish picket structure) demonstrates the mastery of the Buddhist monk the Venerable Yi Man-bong.
McKillop’s curiosity in Korea started nearly by chance. Whereas working within the Chinese language part of the British Library in the course of the early Nineteen Eighties, she recognised that the establishment’s Korean collections lacked specialist experience. Supported by the library, she started finding out Korean on the Faculty of Oriental and African Research (now Soas College of London) beneath William Skillend, one of many founders of Korean research in Britain. What began as a sensible response to a curatorial want turned the defining mental dedication of her profession.
Born in Glasgow, Beth was the eldest daughter of 4 youngsters born to Mary (nee Chalmers), a instructor, and Norman McConochie, a amount surveyor. She attended Glasgow highschool, the place she skipped a 12 months, earlier than becoming a member of Laurel Financial institution college. Aged 16 she entered the College of Glasgow, gaining a humanities diploma earlier than persevering with at Churchill School, Cambridge, the place she did a second diploma in Chinese language research and was among the many first cohort of ladies admitted to the school.
After graduating in 1975 she was chosen by the British Council to participate in an educational trade programme in China. She studied first at a language institute in Beijing after which at Peking College in the course of the closing years of the Cultural Revolution. The expertise left an enduring impression. She later recalled collaborating in wheat harvests, transplanting rice seedlings and serving to to assemble railway engines alongside fellow college students.
Following a short interval with the BBC Monitoring Service, the place she summarised Chinese language-language broadcasts, she joined the British Library in 1981. There she labored first as a analysis assistant and later as curator of the Chinese language and Korean collections.
Amongst her key initiatives was on the library’s assortment of manuscripts from Dunhuang, acquired by the explorer Aurel Stein. Collaborating with Chinese language students and conservators, she helped make hundreds of uncommon manuscript fragments extra accessible by cataloguing, conservation and publication.
She additionally labored carefully with the Japanese scholar Yukio Fujimoto on the primary detailed catalogue of the library’s early Korean books. McKillop would turn into one in every of Britain’s main authorities on Korean e-book historical past and printing – her essay The Historical past of the E book in Korea was revealed within the Oxford Companion to the E book in 2010.
Following the institution of diplomatic relations between Britain and North Korea in 2000, McKillop joined British Library and British Museum delegations on visits to the nation in 2001 and 2002, ensuing within the e-book North Korean Tradition and Society (2004), co-written along with her colleague Jane Portal. She later noticed that North Korea reminded her of China in the course of the Cultural Revolution, recalling dinners in huge, sparsely occupied halls the place damp tablecloths had been used to take away creases earlier than official banquets.
In 2004 she returned to the V&A as keeper of Asia. Throughout the next decade she oversaw main initiatives together with China Design Now, in 2008, and the creation of the Robert H N Ho Household Basis Galleries of Buddhist Artwork. She later turned director of collections and deputy director of the V&A.
Even after retiring from govt management in 2016, she remained an lively scholar, pursuing new analysis initiatives. Her closing main publication, additionally co-written with Portal, was Treasured Past Measure: A Historical past of Korean Ceramics (2024).
A considerate and fair-minded chief, she was admired for her encouragement of youthful curators and researchers, a lot of whom credited her with shaping their careers.
Her affect prolonged past the establishments the place she labored, by instructing at Soas, lectures at worldwide programmes together with the College of Virginia in Charlottesville Uncommon E book Faculty, and as president of the Oriental Ceramic Society from 2018 to 2021.
She was additionally a trustee of Nationwide Museums Scotland and the Sir Percival David Basis of Chinese language Artwork, by which capability McKillop was chargeable for brokering its Chinese language ceramics assortment into the custodianship of the British Museum in 2025.
The museum’s director, Nicholas Cullinan, described it as “the best reward to any museum within the fashionable period”.
In 1973 she married Andy McKillop, a publishing director who later turned a gardener and artist. He survives her, together with their daughter, Lucy, son, Joe, and a grandson, Sam.
